By Donna Dunning
Sensing and Intuitive Personality Type Preferences
Many years ago I taught biology at a community college. One of the courses, an overview of human biology, surveyed the different systems in the body, such as the nervous system, digestive system, respiratory system, circulatory system, etc. The information in this course was more conceptual than detailed.
Many of my students had recently completed a course on taxonomy, which required extensive memory work to name and categorize living things. They likely had to answer questions like this: For seven marks, name the Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species of an earthworm.
Most of the students who excelled in the taxonomy course liked to learn facts. They enjoyed a step-by-step approach to learning and found it easy to organize and memorize concrete data. However, some of these students stumbled when the course I taught required them to overview and integrate more abstract information.
For example, they were less comfortable answering essay questions describing interactions between the respiration and circulation systems. Other students struggled with the memorization and naming course and found it much easier to see broad conceptual connections and links. They performed better when asked integrative, essay type questions.
My challenge was to make sure all learners could master the material.
Learning both Facts and Concepts
I explained to students that it was essential to be able to learn both facts and conceptual links. I encouraged the students who liked to memorize (usually Sensing types) to organize and categorize facts into broader categories and to sequentially link information together. They could then generalize from the data.
I encouraged the more conceptual learners (usually Intuitive types) to develop memorization strategies to help them recall specific facts and details. In this way, they could add more detail to their abstract overviews.
Do you like to learn the facts about information first, or would you rather overview a topic before getting the facts? Do you like step-by-step learning or are you more likely to jump around between ideas? Does your learning environment align to your personality type preferences? Answering these questions will help you figure out how to best learn both facts and concepts.
If you would like more information on personality type and learning, check out my booklet, Introduction to Type and Learning in print or pdf format.
Ohhh Donna
This is one of my “HOT” buttons for learning. In a class or meeting if I don’t have a glimpse of the big picture first I might as well go home. When detail after detail is presented I often don’t stay the course long enough to build them into an overview, I simply go to the beach in my brain. Besides jumping around makes it fun and enlivens the subject for me especially when it is material that is interesting to me. However when I am out of my comfort zone with skills such as down hill skiing there is a time and place for step by step instructions.
Thanks for painting a picture of how to present material for both ways of processing.
Thanks for your comment Sandy. I can relate. I remember a few painful chemistry classes from the distant past that seemed to be all details and procedures. I certainly took mental vacations in those.
Donna, I recall absolutely LOVING Anatomy and Physiology classes in college, but I had to study very hard in order to memorise the names of organs, blood vessels, glands, etc. The way each body system interacted with the other was second-nature to me though.
Even now, when I learn a new task at my job, I cannot simply be told step-by-step what to do. I first need to understand the system I am working with so that I can see where this “task” I’m performing fits into the system. (“So, WHY am I changing this data? Where did the report with the new data come from? When I change the data here, what is going to happen on the back-end?” “So, I can see what happened with these numbers, and that the volumes are out of the ordinary, but what is the algorithim being used to calculate the Weighted Average Handle time? There is a summation of at LEAST 2 other subsets of data used for that… and I need to know where its coming from if I am to understand what could have caused the problem!”)
Yes. I drive my co-workers crazy, I’m sure!