Assess The Importance Of Accommodating Learning Styles In Academia

Summary

This report assesses the importance of accommodating learning styles in academia and an academic work place and determines which learning styles are the most beneficial to accommodate. This is done by first analyzing the current accommodations for each learning style in Fleming’s model of learning then determining which learning styles are the most common. This analysis is then supplemented by personal examples demonstrating the importance of accommodating learning styles for academia and academic work places. The research indicates that academia and academic work places need to make more accommodations for the visual, aural / auditory, and kinaesthetic learning styles. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most widespread learning

This section will discuss the ability of an academic work place to accommodate the various learning styles of Fleming’s Model, one of the most prevalent learning models (Leite, Svinicki, & Shi, 2009). Fleming’s learning model advances previous neurolinguistic programming models, which claim that anyone can model the skills of an exceptional person (Clair & Grinder, 2001). Fleming used this to create his learning styles and claims that if a student can identify their learning style, they can learn most effectively by utilizing that style (Hawk & Shah, 2007).

2.1 Visual Learner Fleming’s first learning style is a visual learner who learns best by seeing what they are learning (VARK Modalities, n.d.). This learning style somewhat succeeds in an academic work place due to the figures and diagrams that often appear in papers and textbooks. As the purpose of these visuals is generally to introduce the reader to the topic, visual learners will easily grasp the basics of what they are learning about. However, the intricacies of the subject are usually developed in a more textual manner, meaning visual learners will have a more difficult time understanding the finer details of the

As such, it would be more worthwhile for an academic work place to accommodate the more common learning styles, as this would the maximize the effect of the accommodations while minimizing the amount of resources used in providing them. In this section, we will break down the distribution of the various learning styles of Fleming’s model in an attempt to highlight which learning styles are the most efficient ones to accommodate. From Figure 1, adapted from Slater, Lujan, and Dicarlo (2007), the majority of uni-modal learners, people who learn in one specific way, are kinaesthetic or read / write learners. However, from Table 1, from Slater et al. (2007), the majority of people are not uni-modal learners, but rather multi-modal learners, those people who learn effectively in multiple ways. Hence, it is possible that if one or two main learning styles, such as the kinaesthetic style, were accommodated, the majority of people could still benefit from the accommodations. This would also avoid the possibility of making colossal changes to the current accommodations, saving resources. Furthermore, from Table 2, from Slater et al. (2007), a number of people can learn equally well with any of the learning styles identified by Fleming. Therefore, accommodating any learning style would