Dr. Z's Reflections on Research
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Wow. This R. M Felder seems to be the master of learning styles and engineering. He has a website that has all of his articles on it. Each article has a wealth of references below it. Other names in the field include Harvey Silver and Richard Strong. I just found an article from Silver and Strong entitled "Integrating Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences." THIS is the article I have been looking for all my life!!!! It integrate the two theories by using the Multiple Intelligences as the major categories and then describing a set of four learning processes or abilities, one for each of the four learning styles, for each intelligence.
After I did a Google search on Harvey Silver, I found at Amazon that he had actually written a complete book on this integration theory. What a find!!!!!!!!
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Monday, February 02, 2004
Perhaps I should emphasize the tool for measuring the learning styles like Myers-Briggs. There aren't many instruments for measuring multiple intelligences.
Myers-Briggs involves:
Extroversion-Introversion
Sensing-Intuition
Thinking-Feeling
Judging-Perceiving
I could use the results of Gerry's surveys of the engineering students in Malaysia at ITTHO.
Here's a good site for M-B
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jungtype.htm
Aha!!! After searching on Schmeck (his inventory was the one I used for my dissertation to measure Learning Styles) and Learning Styles, I found a wonderful website
http://www.indstate.edu/ctl/styles/learning.html#STYLES
He lists Gardner's Multiple Intelligences as Information Processing Models. I KNEW THAT!!! Sheesh, it's been a while since I read about these things. It's funny what you can forget over time.
So I should use IPM as a descriptor.
That didn't work. It was primarily computer-based information processing.
What about active learning? That didn't work. Checked it out in the thesaurus and ERIC doesn't use it. Might still find that phrase in a title or abstract, however.
Used Engineering Education AND Myers-Briggs and found 7 good articles. Problem is that i don't have a printer to print the abstracts. Found a printer in the Youth collection that prints on both sides. That's COOL!!!
Just did a search on Education Full Text and found a few articles using Myers-Briggs and Engineering students as descriptors.
This Blogging is kind of cool. I open a textedit file (simplistic word processor like Wordpad) on my screen and take notes as I work. The last posting explained my research questions and descriptors so I didn't have to search through my pages or files for that information as I sat down to work today. It's a great way to keep on track. It was also useful to print out my search history from my last session. It shows me my successful searches and the descriptors used.
After reviewing the printouts of the 7 sources I found from my search, I found that learning styles may not be the descriptor that I should use. It appears in most of the abstracts from my search that they are defining learning styles as how a student interacts with others while learning. Does the student interact in class? Does the student like to work alone or with other students? These are interesting but not what I am pursuing. I want to know about how their intelligences (spatial, verbal/linguistic, etc) relates to how they are learning about engineering in class.
