Module 5: Assessing Your Learning

Throughout the course of almost any day of my life currently, I'm primarily found listening to music. After taking a full day to record these results through the suggestion of a Listening Journal, it became very apparent what I spend each hour of the day listening to. As previously stated, music. As my husband and I are on opposite work schedules, we are like passing ships in the night during the night. The house is quiet when I wake up and quiet when I leave to go to work. The time that I am home, however, I like to fill the house with some form of noise....to block out the road and neighborhood noise. Seems silly to want to distract myself from one noise and replace it with another, but I do! While the music is playing, I try to complete as much schoolwork as possible. The effectiveness of my listening varied from song to song. Since I stream music online through the use of Pandora or the likes, it chooses random music based on your likes and dislikes. Whenever a song was on that I did not care for, I would either zone out of listening to that and really focus on my work in front of me until the next song came on, or I would stop what I was doing completely, and switch my focus 100% on skipping foward onto the next song. Next, I continued foward to further disect my listening style. To better understand this, I had to compare my results with real human interaction, not an online music station! After completing the textbook evaluation, It heavily pointed towards my hunch that I am both a Critical and Task-Oriented Listener. I am good at quickly evaluating the information that I hear while listening for the underlying bottom line. As well, depending on the situation, I listen to figure out what exactly it is that is needed to be done to complete a task. I like it quick and straight to the point! As for my apprehension when listening, I tested fairly high on the scale of 10 to 50. I averaged a 42. Maybe I think highly of myself, perhaps I would recieve a much different score if I had asked my husband for his input on this evaluation. It's quite possible that he would see some characteristics in me that I dont see my self, or choose not to see. All in all, this was a good activity to really help clarify my different strengths and weaknesses in myself when it comes to listening. It's something that we all partake in numerous times a day, every day. After having these results fresh in my mind, it makes me want to try harder to work on and improve the ares of realtional and analytical listening styles. It can't hurt, right?