BEST WAY TO STUDY

For some time, research studies have concluded that we do not learn / study in precisely the same way. For this brief commentary, I have deliberately grouped both terms as similar. While this common sense approach towards scholarship represents a welcomed message for parents and students, many teachers still teach a large number of pupils one way, more often than not, by using traditional teaching styles that might appear to be successful for the teacher but unsuccessful for a large majority of the youngsters seated in front of them. This is incorrect teaching -- proof that common sense continues to be not all that common within many of today's classrooms.

My following commentary attempts to address this key issue, while at the same time, to offer suggestions for possible classroom improvement. If teachers require their students to receive domain-specific information in a way that does not correspond with their dominant learning modalities, to perform under classroom conditions that interfere with their preferred learning, or to demonstrate learning in such a way that fails them to use their more dominant intelligences, then such teachers create within their students forms of artificial stress, reduced motivation, and repressed performance. Along this same line of thinking, there is a considerable body of research evidence suggesting that many special education students who have been formally categorized, for example, as learning disabled (LD) are, in fact, not LD students per se but assessed and taught incorrectly in terms of their dominant learning style. Perhaps a more positive way of describing their LD is that they simply learn differently!

And now, after painting a negative but realistic image of numerous contemporary classrooms ... the good news, and the good news is indeed promising! An efficient classroom teacher will tend to teach