Blog 5

According to the completed Felder & Soloman Learning Styles Inventory, about two thirds of my students in Lab 1 are visual learners and those in Lab 2 are equally divided in visual and verbal learners. I’m a visual learner (9 on the scale), which may give the impression that the students with a visual learning style have an advantage.

Well, I’m not so sure. Each lab includes a quiz, addressing the questions most often missed in the previous lab report, an introduction, activities, and writing the lab report. With all this squeezed into 1 hour and 50 minutes, I cannot spend too much time on an introduction that features overhead and other visual aids. The students are required to come to class prepared, which means that they have read the lab manual and reviewed the related text from the lecture. During the last lab, I gave the students some verbal background information about force and illustrated on the blackboard how to add vectors, followed by an explanation of the activities. The activities were also described in the lab manual (some were illustrated, others were not), which may have put the verbal learners at an advantage. But I think, by performing the activities and watching their peers, the visual learners should also have been able to understand what was happening. I told the students to always bring their textbook and use it to discuss the lab questions. For future labs, I may ask them to open the respective chapter and then refer to the illustrations in the book during my introduction. Together with my drawings on the blackboard, this should support the visual learners a little bit more.

The students are working in small groups of three. While they are writing their lab reports, I usually go from group to group and answer questions if needed. I already noticed that while some groups need verbal instructions only, others require illustrations or nothing at all. Even though each group has one member with a background in physics and one with higher math skills, I suspect that only the groups which rarely require an explanation have members of both learning styles. Since they seem to complement each other, it could have been helpful to all students' learning experience if I had known their learning preferences along with their academic history prior to building the groups. Well, it’s too late now. I’ll try my best to incorporate as many teaching techniques as possible. I think this should become easier as I become more comfortable with teaching biomechanics.