Responce to Jessica 2/3/2011

Jessica ended her post about learning styles with the question: Can a person be taught to be a different kind of learner? If so, who does the teaching?

In Steven Stahl's article "Different Strokes for Different Folks?" he mentions several articles in which the participants (students) are evaluated to their style of learning. Those students then are taught through the different styles of teaching and the researchers see if their style is correlated to the style they learned best from. In most, (if not all) of these studies, the results did not support the hypothesis that students learn better through their matched learning style. Like Garlikov mentioned in his article, people learn different things different ways. The example he gave was riding a bike. No one can learn how to ride a bike by watching someone, they have to do it themselves. Yet, somethings you do not have to learn first hand.
The article also mentioned the Myers-briggs type indicator and Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. The Myers-brigg type indicator is a personality test, actually, it is probably the most accurate out of all the personality tests. [(Through 72 questions it tells you if you are Extroverted vs. Introverted, iNtuitive vs. Sensing, Feeling vs. Thinking , and Judging vs. Perceiving. There are 16 possible combinations -- 16 different personality types. (Take it your self at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp .)]Gardners theory of multiple intelligence is criticized for being more of a personality test than a measure of intelligence. There are eight different types (Naturalistic has been recently added) and he is currently coming up with more! So in all of these tests, they are not even using an accurate measure. The type of learner someone is does not measure their ability to learn from a certain style-- it measures their personality traits. As Stahl mentions, personality traits have little to do with how well you learn.
Music was mentioned a lot in the articles as well. Music can be taught visually, like analyzing a piece of music or reading notation. Music is also taught through audio, also analyzing a piece of music or how to tell if an instrument is in tune (listening to the sound waves). And finally, you have to learn how to play an instrument by actually playing it, this would be a tactile way of learning. So it is confusing to me how someone can be a 'musical learner' when music is taught different ways. The same goes for many other lecture hall class, you have to write what is on the board as well as listen to what the professor is saying. Unless someone has a certain type of learning disability that limits them, anyone can learn any way. This can be self taught as well as by someone else. Regardless, it does not matter which way someone learns best, they should learn every way, because we are going to be faced with situations from all these aspects in the real world.

Question: Have you ever been faced with a situation where you could not learn something one way but could learn it another?