Brains process information differently. This affects how students learn in school and how teachers teach them.
Three Basic Learning Styles
The brain processes information in three basic methods.
- Visual
- Auditory
- Kinesthetic
Visual learners watch and learn. Auditory learners listen and learn. Kinesthetic learners do and learn. In the lower elementary classrooms, children use the three learning styles throughout the day by watching, listening and doing. As students progress through elementary school, auditory learning is increased. Visual and kinesthetic activities decrease. By high school, the major teaching method is auditory. High school classes are often structured for teachers to give information in lecture format and students take notes.
Learning Styles Are Changing
Terri Sessoms, teacher and motivational speaker, states that a generation ago the predominant learning style was auditory. Students sat in a classroom, took notes, memorized them, regurgitated the information on a test, received a grade, and moved on to new information. Today’s students, according to Sessoms, are now more visual learners and less auditory.
The U.S. military has noticed this and changed teaching methods from auditory to visual to quickly allow new recruits to learn new information efficiently. Schools, being traditional in nature, have not been keeping up on how the brain works.
Visual Learners Convert Words to Pictures
A psychological study by the University of Pennsylvania recently discovered that visual learners convert words into a visual mental representation. When they read a word, they see the image that word represents. The stronger the visual learning style, the more active the brain in the visual cortex.
The University of Pennsylvania used fMRI technology, magnetic resonance reasoning, to measure brain activity. It was discovered that "the more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words." [1]
Auditory Learners Convert Pictures into Words
On the reverse side of the coin, auditory (verbal) learners did the opposite. "Those participants who considered themselves verbal learners were found under fMRI to have brain activity in a region associated with phonological cognition when faced with a picture, suggesting they have a tendency to convert pictorial information into linguistic representations. [1]
Learning Styles Study in Pennsylvania
Eighteen students volunteered to participate in the study. Students were asked to participate in a memory game. While playing the game, brain activity was observed while students processed words or pictures. Auditory learners activated the portion of the brain that processes words when seeing a word and the visual learners activated the portion of the brain that processes images.
The brain is constantly translating information depending on how it is wired to learn. Each person is wired differently and this affects patterns of brain activity during learning.
[1] "Visual Learners Convert Words to Pictures in the Brain and Vice Versa, Says Psychology Study," Science Daily, March 28, 2009.
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