Learning methods

Factual Questions
1

This thread has to do with methods of teaching/learning.

I am wanting to know to what extent methods of teaching have been studied, and if there exists certain “categories” that a person can belong to, in terms of what teaching/learning style is best suited to them.

I started thinking about this at a point in my life where I virtually gave up any hope of being able to “grasp” computer programming, only to give it one last crack by purchasing a particular book that had received rave reviews on Amazon.com about its highly “accessible” learning style.

Opening up and reading that book was like sipping from the fountain of knowledge. Not only was I finally “getting” how to program, but I also took notice of the way this book was teaching how to program. One of the main things I noticed was how the book was doing away with what I will call “rote learning”. That is, the book did not simply bombard me with programming theory and expect me to memorise it through some kind of rote process (this was the way I got through a lot of high school and university - I would often simply go over and over something in a rote fashion to the point that I could remember the words, usually without understanding their meaning. I have since come to the opinion that this is not learning (at least not for me), it’s just a mind trick, much like my now opinion of mnemonics). Instead, this book focused far more strongly on computer programming concepts. The book would not begin to explain a concept unless it first gave a very clear, non-technical explanation of the problem that was trying to be solved. Once the reader clearly understood the problem, only then would the book then say “and here’s how to solve it”. This, of course, resulted in many “aha!” moments, which were few and far between in dozens of other programming books and materials I had studied previously. I will call this method “understand problem first, better understand solution second”.

The book also explained every concept, term and idea using only any words, concepts or ideas that had already been clearly explained. (Ever tried to look up a definition or explanation of a word or concept, only to have that definition/explanation contain words and terms you also don’t understand, rendering it useless?)

What I want to know is, to what extent have learning methods been studied, can I do some kind of online test to determine what method best suits me, and is there anywhere I can read up on these learning methods?

To give another example:

When I was in school, and we were taught about prime numbers and the fibonacci sequence, I always used to ask the teacher “But so what? Why do we give special recognition to numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1, or to a sequence of numbers that keeps adding together the previous two in the sequence? What is the bloody point of singling out for special study these seemingly arbitrary concepts?” In the classes I was in, no teacher could ever answer these questions meaningfully. What I would have far preferred is for the teacher to get up and explain why prime numbers matter, not make us remember the first 10 or 15 or so.

Same goes for the periodic table. To this day I can recall the first 15 or 20 elements in the order they appear on the table, but blowed if I can be certain why they are ordered that way (atomic weight?) or even how to interpret the numbers on the table.

I hope I have explained my question(s) clearly enough. This is more of a general commentary on something I am only recently discovering about myself, and I am hoping someone can pick up on it keep pushing me in the right direction.

Thank you.

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bump

3

IANAdegreed teacher, but I remember reading about there being people who learn mostly through their eyes (which IME can be further divided into people who learn from pictures and those who learn from reading), through their ears (from receiving a lecture, or those folks who mumble while reading their classnotes) and through their hands. I can’t provide a cite, but as a consultant, teaching is an important part of my job and one of the things I try to do with every new client is figure out which of my contacts and students fall into each style.

Further, things like what colors to use are also important. If I’m going to explain things to an accountant, I know I have to avoid red: B/W is best; they like tables but not text or pics. If I’m preparing a document for a bunch of engineers or production workers, it should have few letters, big pics and primary colors, while another document for telesales people (specially if mostly women) should have lots or letters, few schematics and use pastels liberally.

Oh, and the periodic table is by atomic number. That’s the number of protons in the nucleus (identical to the number of electrons in the uncharged atom); there are a few cases where an element’s weight (which is an average of the weights of its isotopes, taking into account the relative amounts of the isotopes) happens to be lower than the weight of the previous element.

4

Thanks Nava! Interesting stuff. Sounds like you put a lot of thought in to the learning materials that you prepare.

I’d be really interested to hear from some others as well.

5

Try a google on “learning styles” with the quotes. I think it’s what you’re looking for.

6

Yes and yes. Different “learning styles” and “learner centered instruction” seem to be hot topics nowadays in higher education: at the college where I teach, they’ve recently begun trying to raise faculty awareness of such things. (“raise faculty awareness”—jeez, that sounds jargony)

I’m not sure where I could point you that would be more helpful than just telling you to Google “learning styles,” but this questionaire looks like an online version of the test they demonstrated to us to determine our “learning styles,” and this page describes the different learning styles that that questionaire is supposed to measure.

Although, to some extent, it sounds to me like the computer programming book you described was just an example of good teaching vs. bad teaching, or a good book to learn from vs. a book to use as a reference. Which book was it, by the way?

7

Thanks for those links, Thudlow Boink, I’m about to check them out.

I was attempting to learn web programming via the language PHP, and the book was PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites, Visual Quickpro Guide by Larry Ullman.