Understanding Personal Learning Style and Adaptation: The Learning Lens Protocol
The evening my daughter Sophie sat at the kitchen table in our Portland, Oregon home, staring at a pile of flashcards with the blank expression of someone who has been doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, I realized we had a learning problem that had nothing to do with intelligence or effort. She was ten years old, and she had been making and reviewing flashcards for her science vocabulary test for three days. She had written each term on one side and the definition on the other. She had reviewed the stack five times. And she could not remember more than half the terms. "I do not understand," she said, and the frustration in her voice was the frustration of someone who was working hard and getting nowhere. I sat down next to her and asked her to show me how she studied. She picked up a card, read the term, flipped it, read the definition, and set it aside. Then she picked up the next card and did the same thing. It was a passive, visual, repetitive process that engaged almost none of the cognitive mechanisms that actually create lasting memory. "What if," I said, "instead of reading the cards, you drew the terms? Or acted them out? Or made up a story that connected them all?" She looked at me with the skepticism of someone who had been sold learning tricks before. "That sounds silly," she said. "So does not remembering," I replied. ...