Analysis of the Reading Poll
Apr. 26th, 2006 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo, here are some conclusions from the poll results. Since it's a volunteer sample, this does not represent the general population, merely those people on my friendslist who cared enough to respond, but I found the results somewhat interesting anyway.
1) Everyone who requires effort to read text is a visual. However, the sample size may be too small to really draw any conclusions, since only two people responded this way - three if we include PB, who has a lot of trouble reading text on screens and thus has no LJ. There is also the possible confounding variable that both my respondents have worked in typesetting, in which it's sometimes an advantage to be able to see text as a design rather than as information. They're also both visual learners with a strong tactile/kinesthetic component, which I think matches PB as well.
2) Most auditory learners can't see text without reading it. The one exception was one who could choose not to read it. This fits with the next two items:
3) All of the auditory learners were fast readers. There was a mild negative correlation between having a tactile/kinesthetic component to learning and reading speed. There was no significant correlation between being a visual learner and reading speed. The last part of this isn't surprising. The middle part probably isn't, either, since text is profoundly not a T/K way of accessing information. The first part goes against educational commonsense, but makes perfect sense to me.
4) There was a strong correlation between being a fast reader and not being able to see text without reading it. In fact, if we omit the people who chose not to try and estimate their reading speed (boo), there were only two people who reported not being able to see text without reading it who were not fast readers, and I suspect one of them misreported her reading speed - I'm quite sure her reading speed for fiction is > 600 wpm, even if her reading speed for other types of text isn't.
5) There was a weak correlation between reading speed and not having to hear a voice in your head. There was a stronger correlation between being sometimes hearing the voice, but not always, and reading speed. There didn't appear to be any correlation between any of the types of voices and reading speed. This surprised me a little. I was expecting there to be a strong correlation between "no" and reading speed. However, if we lump the "sometimes" and the "no"'s together, into the group that has the ability to read without hearing the mental voice, then there is a correlation, although it's still moderate rather than strong.
6) There was no correlation between not having to hear the mental voice and learning modality. This shocked the fool out of me. I had more or less convinced myself that tactile/kinesthetics and spatial visuals needed the voice, and linear visuals and auditories didn't. Yes, I suspect most of you visuals are surprised at that last assertion, and it's actually the one that has the most support; all of the auditories fell into the lump group I describe in #5.
So, any conclusions? Well, again, they're only suggestive (at best) for the general population, but here's what I got out of it: some people (and I'm in this category) process text on a deep level, without having to filter it through the actual auditory parts of the language system. This tends to be associated with a faster reading speed and greater automaticity. Being an auditory learner may help with this process, possibly because deep level is "closer" to the auditory processing than in other modalities, but the jury's still out on that. Other people still have to process text by "translating" it into heard language in their minds, and then processing that language; I'm highly impressed by those who have fairly fast reading speeds despite the extra processing involved. However, his seems to also be correlated with the ability to see text as graphics, as something other than words, which those of us in the first category tend not to be able to do.
My beef with most learning modality tests is that they confound learning well through visual methods with learning well by reading, which I think is a primarily auditory skill for most people - you learn language as a heard/spoken thing first, and only afterwards attach this set of markings to it. Being a spatially/visually gifted individual does not necessarily help with reading, and in fact may hurt. In my case, I might well argue that I'm not truly an auditory-primary learner - I am specifically a text-primary learner, based off a fundamentally auditory sensory mode and a cognitive preference for linguistic modes of learning. I learn things much better by reading them than by any other method. But I'm not a visual learner at all - show me a picture and it's likely to confuse me. In fact, I like diagrams better than photos or (especially) drawings, because the diagrams are more text-like than the image is. Say something to me, and I'm more likely to understand. Say it and let me write it down, and I have it forever. (Learning-by-doing falls somewhere in between.)
1) Everyone who requires effort to read text is a visual. However, the sample size may be too small to really draw any conclusions, since only two people responded this way - three if we include PB, who has a lot of trouble reading text on screens and thus has no LJ. There is also the possible confounding variable that both my respondents have worked in typesetting, in which it's sometimes an advantage to be able to see text as a design rather than as information. They're also both visual learners with a strong tactile/kinesthetic component, which I think matches PB as well.
2) Most auditory learners can't see text without reading it. The one exception was one who could choose not to read it. This fits with the next two items:
3) All of the auditory learners were fast readers. There was a mild negative correlation between having a tactile/kinesthetic component to learning and reading speed. There was no significant correlation between being a visual learner and reading speed. The last part of this isn't surprising. The middle part probably isn't, either, since text is profoundly not a T/K way of accessing information. The first part goes against educational commonsense, but makes perfect sense to me.
4) There was a strong correlation between being a fast reader and not being able to see text without reading it. In fact, if we omit the people who chose not to try and estimate their reading speed (boo), there were only two people who reported not being able to see text without reading it who were not fast readers, and I suspect one of them misreported her reading speed - I'm quite sure her reading speed for fiction is > 600 wpm, even if her reading speed for other types of text isn't.
5) There was a weak correlation between reading speed and not having to hear a voice in your head. There was a stronger correlation between being sometimes hearing the voice, but not always, and reading speed. There didn't appear to be any correlation between any of the types of voices and reading speed. This surprised me a little. I was expecting there to be a strong correlation between "no" and reading speed. However, if we lump the "sometimes" and the "no"'s together, into the group that has the ability to read without hearing the mental voice, then there is a correlation, although it's still moderate rather than strong.
6) There was no correlation between not having to hear the mental voice and learning modality. This shocked the fool out of me. I had more or less convinced myself that tactile/kinesthetics and spatial visuals needed the voice, and linear visuals and auditories didn't. Yes, I suspect most of you visuals are surprised at that last assertion, and it's actually the one that has the most support; all of the auditories fell into the lump group I describe in #5.
So, any conclusions? Well, again, they're only suggestive (at best) for the general population, but here's what I got out of it: some people (and I'm in this category) process text on a deep level, without having to filter it through the actual auditory parts of the language system. This tends to be associated with a faster reading speed and greater automaticity. Being an auditory learner may help with this process, possibly because deep level is "closer" to the auditory processing than in other modalities, but the jury's still out on that. Other people still have to process text by "translating" it into heard language in their minds, and then processing that language; I'm highly impressed by those who have fairly fast reading speeds despite the extra processing involved. However, his seems to also be correlated with the ability to see text as graphics, as something other than words, which those of us in the first category tend not to be able to do.
My beef with most learning modality tests is that they confound learning well through visual methods with learning well by reading, which I think is a primarily auditory skill for most people - you learn language as a heard/spoken thing first, and only afterwards attach this set of markings to it. Being a spatially/visually gifted individual does not necessarily help with reading, and in fact may hurt. In my case, I might well argue that I'm not truly an auditory-primary learner - I am specifically a text-primary learner, based off a fundamentally auditory sensory mode and a cognitive preference for linguistic modes of learning. I learn things much better by reading them than by any other method. But I'm not a visual learner at all - show me a picture and it's likely to confuse me. In fact, I like diagrams better than photos or (especially) drawings, because the diagrams are more text-like than the image is. Say something to me, and I'm more likely to understand. Say it and let me write it down, and I have it forever. (Learning-by-doing falls somewhere in between.)
