MTU PROFESSOR DEVELOPS CLASS FOR ALL LEARNING TYPES
HOUGHTON, MI--A professor in Michigan Technological University's Department of Environmental Engineering is attempting to achieve a more balanced classroom. Through a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Kurt Paterson will develop a class that addresses different learning styles.
Psychological studies have discovered that people learn in different ways. The common eight that Paterson studied were active and reflective, sensing and intuitive, visual and verbal, and sequential and global. Active learners learn by doing something and participating, while a reflective learning type thinks about the ideas. Sensing involves learning concrete ideas, while intuitive learning is based on conceptual information. Visual learners need pictures, graphs, demonstrations or anything they can see to learn. Verbal learners learn through oral and written explanations. Finally, sequential learning is a logical flow of information and how it connects, while global learning is the big picture. Students usually have many of these learning types. Using these criteria, Paterson evaluated over 100 environmental engineering undergraduates at Michigan Tech and found that they were primarily active, sensing, visual and sequential learners. Unfortunately, traditional educational tools, textbooks and lectures, promote only the verbal learning style.
Paterson hopes to integrate all learning types into a new course for sophomores in Michigan Tech's Department of Environmental Engineering called Environmental Monitoring and Measurement Analysis. "I hope to find a better way to educate students in a changing educational environment," he says.
The four-day per week class will teach in a variety of ways. Day one of the class will be a traditional lecture and would cover the motivation of the topic, a measurement technique and a statistical technique. The second day of the class will use a specially designed computer based tool. Students will complete a virtual experiment and use sample data. The computer laboratory portion of the class will be repeatable and will allow the student to learn at his or her own pace. The next day of class, the students will participate in a lab in a real environment. The final day, students will present their data and have a discussion to wrap up the topic of the week.
"Using all eight ways of learning, we will have a more balanced classroom," Paterson explains, "We hope to have better performance and better retention. We are losing students due to our teaching techniques, and we need to reach all of the students."
The pilot of this course will be launched in the spring of 2001 at MTU. After the pilot program, the computer programs and other materials will be released as a resource for faculty everywhere, in the same way that a textbook would.
For more information, contact Dr. Kurt Paterson at 906/487-3495 or by email at paterson@mtu.edu.
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07/20/99MTN133