Strategies for Bridging Learning Styles

Abstract

Regardless of the instrument used to determine learning styles, it is commonly accepted that people learn in different ways. As Professors, we tend to teach in a style that matches the way we ourselves learn. This may or may not match the learning styles of the students in our classroom. As Graphics educators, we cannot meet every student’s learning style at all times, however we can use our understanding of learning styles to address the differences between our teaching style and the students’ learning styles.

This paper is follow-up of a paper presented at the ASEE Annual Conference in Portland, June 2005. The Portland paper reported the results of a survey administered to graphic professionals and graphics students. Using the results of that one survey we can generalize that graphic professionals strongly favor (70 percent) the Concrete Sequential learning style, while only 34 percent of graphics students favor this style. On the other hand, 51 percent of the students favored the Concrete Random style, which was favored by only 34 percent of the faculty (Sadowski et.al., 2005). Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of their teaching, graphics educators must make an effort to “bridge” the gaps created by the differences in teaching and learning styles. In this paper the authors look at instructional strategies and techniques that graphics educators can employ to teach students with different learning styles. Often basic style adjustments, additional explanations, or alternative activities can help a student learn and achieve success. As educators we need to select the most appropriate style for the learning situation and determine the importance of matching the styles of the learners in order to achieve the intended goal.