Multimodal Me

As part of a discussion on learning styles I participated in today, I took the VARK assessment of my own learning styles.  I've always considered myself a very visual person: I like to make things look pretty, I admire the pretty works of others, and of course I spend a lot of time reading.

The test measures four aspects: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic.  (Hence the scary acronym.)  One thing I appreciated about the test was that I was able to check more than one response to the questions posed, which is truly a liberating feeling on a multiple-choice test.

I was surprised by a couple of things.  One was how high my kinesthetic score was--it lagged behind the top (Reading/Writing) by only one point.  Now I flash back to how many times I've "learned by doing," especially with practical skills like knitting or cooking, and that makes sense to me.

The other surprise was just how clustered my scores were.  Auditory was lowest, no big surprise.  But it wasn't too far off from the others, and the other three were all within one point of one another.  The lovely answer that the website spit out for me was not that I fit into any one neat category, but rather I'm "multimodal."  

So, apparently, are most people: 60% of the population, according to the fact sheet of helpful explanation linked above.  Also, "One interesting piece of information that people with multimodal preferences have told us is that it is necessary for them to use more than one strategy for learning and communicating. They feel insecure with only one. Alternatively those with a single preference often 'get it' by using the set of strategies that align with their single preference."

Absolutely!  I definitely am an over-compensator when it comes to explaining things to others, or making information available.  This is very likely a strength to have as a teacher, but it's still nice to have a language to explain why I teach the way I do (other than just "wacky").