Paper Review: The Sensory Modality Used for Learning Affects Grades

I apologize for the long delay between my last few posts. The beginning of the semester brings sets of challenges every few months and, in addition to that, I now have a beautiful seven week old daughter at home. Finding the time to research and write these posts has gotten more difficult, as you can imagine, but look for my next posts to be up sooner rather than later.

I am taking a break from examining the sources listed on the bibliography page for VARK and instead have decided to review a paper that specifically addresses some classroom research and VARK. The paper is titled: The sensory modality used for learning affects grades.

The title of this article really caught my eye. The title alone is a fairly bold assertion. Does the study provide evidence in favor of such a claim?

So, in this study, students in physiology or research methodology classes (in the fields of medicine and sports science) were given a VARK questionnaire. Then the authors compared the average grades across the various VARK groupings and found some differences. Let’s examine what they found in more detail.

The first thing the authors did was to administer the VARK questionnaire and determine the student’s “learning style.” Students were deemed unimodal or multimodal, depending on whether they had high scores in more than one modality or not. The unimodal students were classified as a V, A, R, or a K learner. The multimodal students were also classified as a V, A, R, or a K learner based on whatever their strongest preference was. If students had two modalities tie for their strongest preference, they were excluded from the study.

The authors employed two methods of assessment in the classes: Multiple Choice questions and applied “arithmetic” questions. For the multiple choice questions, “No significant differences were detected in the outcomes of students that used different sensory modalities for learning in either unimodal or multimodal students.”

For the arithmetic questions, it gets more complicated. Here are the highlights:

“unimodal students that used the R modality for learning obtained significantly higher grades… than A and K students”

“…there were no statistically significant differences between arithmetic grades in multimodal students that used different sensory modalities for learning.”

“Multimodal A students had significantly higher scores than unimodal A students…This suggests that multimodal A students … may have used another mode better suited to solve arithmetic problems. These results support Fleming’s proposal that multimodal students are flexible and can use the mode that best suits the subject.”

“…multimodal R students had significantly lower scores than unimodal R students. …may be due to a better focus of the strength for solving problems associated with the preferred use of the R modality in unimodal students.”

Going through these, the first is fairly straight forward. The students that were classified as R learners do better at written arithmetic problems than the A and K learners. Taken at face value, this seems to be the strongest claim in this paper. However, there is one large reason to be skeptical of the author’s conclusion.

This study did not control how students with the various modalities learned. Why is that important? Well, even though a student preferred the R mode (Reading/Writing), we are unable to know that they actually used this mode more than any other mode in the class. Furthermore, the material was taught normally- that is, the instructor did not tailor the teaching of information to one modality or another. So, we can’t really conclude that the R learners did better because of their learning in the R domain. Was there more instruction targeted to the R domain or the other domains? Without controlled some of these things, this study leaves us with very little solid evidence that we can draw conclusions from.

Another interpretation of these data goes this way: Perhaps the R learners like to read more than the other types of learners and so they read more of the book and thus spent more time studying. If that is the case, the author of this paper has found that students that like to read will read more and may study more and thus get better grades. I don’t think anyone in academia would find that result to be surprising or helpful.

The other three quotes above relate to how unimodal and multimodal students compare. Fleming has suggested that multimodal students can choose which modality works best given a certain situation. In theory, this should mean that multimodal students should do better than unimodal students in each area (multimodal V vs unimodal V and so on…). Although a previous study did find this (El Tantawi, 2009), the current study did not. When comparing general groupings of unimodal and multimodal students, no differences were found. When comparing specific preferences, the multimodal A’s did better than the unimodal, which fits with Fleming’s claim, but the multimodal R’s did worse than the unimodal R’s. The author tries to explain this away as a difference in the ability to concentrate, but this finding flies directly in the face Fleming’s claim. What we are left with is the inability to accept either finding. Instead, we can say that the data from this study add little to the evidence in favor of Fleming’s claim about multimodal students choosing whichever modality works best for a given situation.

At the end of the article, Ramirez argued the following:

“…no differences in the outcome after multiple choice questions were detected between students that used different sensory modalities to obtain new information in either unimodal or multimodal students. Also, there were no differences between unimodal and multimodal students. Therefore, multiple choice questions appear not to discriminate against students with any particular sensory modality preference.”

This is an interesting claim, isn’t it? Apparently scantron exams are the way to go in all subjects including math, physics, reading, and writing. When instructors give students arithmetic problems (which were basically critical thinking problems) or if an exam focuses on problem solving without multiple choice questions, then these authors argue that the exam is biased in favor of certain students. As I stated above, a more probable interpretation of their data could be that those students that were R learners like to read, which leads them to read more, study more, and thus do better on the more difficult critical thinking portions of the class.

To finish up, the title of this article is a bit misleading, as there is no evidence presented on which sensory modality is used for learning by these students. Just because someone is an A learner does not mean that they solely use that particular modality for learning. A more appropriate title might be Student sensory modality preferences may relate to (or be predictive of) grades on arithmetic problems.

References

Ramirez, BU. (2011). The sensory modality used for learning affects grades. Advances in Physiology Education 35: 270-274.

                                                                                                   

El Tantawi, MMA. (2009). Factors affecting postgraduate dental students’ performance in a biostatistics and research design course. Journal of Dental Eduction 73: 614-623.