Sunday, March 9, 2014

My Learning Styles "Gravitate" Me Toward Science...


My personality reflects my learning style, and has ultimately been an important influence on the content area I have chosen in my career as an educator. As a learner, I exhibit traits of an active and reflective learner, intuitive learner, visual learner, and global learner. These are important qualities to understand why I enjoy science so much.

As an active and reflective learner, I prefer to simultaneously think through learning concepts while actively engaging in them. I believe science requires an intimate connection between both learning strategies, as much of it relies on observation, analysis, and experimentation working together to produce a result.

As an intuitive learner, I am able to understand abstract and mathematical concepts with relative ease, and can identify relationships among various concepts. As a visual learner, I learn with ease through the use of visual aids such as pictures and diagrams. My abilities as a global learner allow me to arrange concepts to fit together and understand the big picture. These learning abilities are important because science is a highly abstract, mathematical, and visual subject, and extends beyond the application of simple concepts; rather, it requires one to have the ability to think and visualize multiple facets of concepts in order to realize the connections between them and, ultimately, the big picture. Earth systems are an excellent example of what I am talking about here. We cannot see them as a whole, as they are measured to the vast extent of planet Earth. However, we can see their effects on our immediate environments, formulate mathematical calculations to understand their nature, and design models that can illustrate their effects on the Earth as a whole. These, among many other approaches to understanding the concepts that contribute to the complexity of Earth systems, allow us to visualize them in the big picture.

No comments:

Post a Comment