Essay #1: Learning Styles

This first essay asks you to analyze your learning preferences using several inventories that are available on the web. Most of us have a preferred way to learn, although we may not have been aware of that preference. The inventories should help you look at your own preferences critically.

Teachers have preferred ways of presenting course content, and sometimes they aren't aware of those preferences either. In the classes you are currently taking, analyze your teachers' teaching styles or preferences.

Just as there is no right or wrong learning style, there is no right or wrong teaching style either. It's especially useful, however, to be able to size up a teaching style at the very beginning of the semester by looking at the course syllabus and class activities. Then you can adapt your learning strategies to make the best use of the teachers' styles in your classes. This essay will help you figure out how to do that. Useful, huh?

VIDEO: Use this link to access a video about learning styles. It is geared for elementary school teachers, but it presents information about learning styles in an interesting way.

Three things you can do today:

1. Remove your Google Alert for barter or bartering and add a new one for injuries consumer products. You'll see how the examples returned by this new alert will help you in the next two Short Takes in which we work with statistics about injuries associated with consumer products that send people to the emergency room.
   
   
2. Read some of the Short Takes on Bartering now available in the Zines. Remember that you can read the ones from your class as well as ones written by students in other sections. Make a note of the paragraphs you think are especially strong and those that appear weak. What features do you notice that put a paragraph in one or the other category?
   
   
3. Information Literacy Exercise #5: Knowing that you don't know will increase your sensitivity to what you don't know. In college, expect to encounter a lot of new ideas and terms in all your classes. If you don't understand something, learn the resources available to you that can help you build your understanding. Especially, learn how and where to ask questions. For this exercise, if you don't get the joke in any of the cartoons, say so in the discussion group. If you do understand some of the jokes that confuse others, then contribute your explanation.