Multiple Intelligences and My Learning Style

As per the guidelines of one of my grad school courses, I was to take this test on Multiple Intelligences and reflect on the following questions:

• What are your areas of personal strength?
• How should learning be structured to best meet your personal needs? What needs to occur in the teaching-learning process to help develop your other intelligences?

Here are my test results:

The complete list of intelligences and their relationships to learning are available if you’d like to look a them. I’m not too sure what to make of it. I’m not very surprised that my music score was high, but I am surprised that my visual/spatial was not higher. Also, while I didn’t do well in French class in high school, I have always used writing/note taking as an integral aspect of my learning process. Often going to lectures and taking notes (which were thorough enough to command audiences at exam time) was sufficient for my studies. Reading alone, however, has been a struggle, unless I have a high degree of intrinsic motivation for the subject matter.

To answer the questions:

• What are your areas of personal strength?

My strongest area is Musical Intelligence. As I mentioned above, this comes as no surprise, nor should it to anyone who knows me. Aside from singing, I have learned at some point to play about a dozen instruments to varying degrees of mediocrity. While not a fantastic player, I learned to play most of them to a level of personal satisfaction and good enough for public performance, but hardly the calibre of professional performing musicians of any stripe. Most of my extra curricular pursuits from elementary onward involved some sort of music study, and even now I love few free-time activities as much as attending a concert, although I seldom do so.

From there, I have a clump of intelligences for the next six, starting six points down from Music and themselves having only a six-point spread. Then it’s another seven-point drop to Intrapersonal. From this I can see a clear separation between my strongest and weakest points to “the pack,” but the middle has very little differentiation, and may be partially due to my answers on this particular day or the questions asked.

I often call myself a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, and in my own life have had a difficult time settling on a graduate program to pursue. I’ve been interested in international relations, business, communications, graphic design, computer science and linguistics; I’ve even considered going back to school and doing a professional degree in engineering or architecture. That’s really quite the gamut. I frequently find my time-wasting on the Internet drawn to one of these areas of interest. It comes as no surprise that I have such a clump of intelligences so tightly packed around the middle.

But of the two intelligences tied for second-place, I would have to say when it comes to formal learning, the body/kinaesthetic aspect is more important to me, usually in combination with visual/spatial. While some would argue that my note-taking in high school and university was more evidence for my linguistic intelligence, I believe it was the physical creation of the words on paper, manifesting them in something visual as I listened to the lecture and observed my professors, that helped ingrain these ideas onto my memory.

I love all things mechanical and creative. From early elementary school I have memories of taking apart machines just to see how they worked. I was thankfully wise enough to limit myself to what a screwdriver or set of pliers could put back together; things that were soldered or glued in place were left alone for fear of upsetting my parents by “breaking” something. Thankfully it never came to that, and I secretly continued to pull things apart for the mere joy of understanding them and putting them back together. I think this disassembly-reassembly grew in concert with my visual-spacial skills, making it easier for me to visualize multiple dimensions in my mind when constructing or creating things in my heads’ space.

• How should learning be structured to best meet your personal needs? What needs to occur in the teaching-learning process to help develop your other intelligences?

To meet my personal needs, learning should take place in an environment where I receive some visual instruction as well as have the opportunity to physically process either the information or the physical product I am studying. If it is possible to put rote memorization to music, I am more likely to remember it; as evidenced by my memory of my musical multiplication tables from over twenty years ago to high-school history jingles for classes I never even took.

To develop my other intelligences, I would most need to focus on my intrapersonal skills. My areas of particular weakness are self-understanding and sometimes with self-paced instruction. Where I am highly motivated, I have no problems progressing through materials, but without this I find more interesting pursuits for my time. As my greatest strength is music, either putting a series of tasks to a jingle or short song/chant might work as a meditation to keep me on task. I also find using outside time managers (such as the Pomodoro Technique) help me to get in some solid work time toward completing an undesirable or externally-motivated task. To help with my inner, personal development, again some kind of music-based chant or song might be enough to help me reflect on the day or task I have completed and visualize for the day ahead. I am not sure how any particular course or program that was not intentionally designed for such growth could encourage it.

In closing, I thought the exercise was interesting, as were the results, but I’d like to take the test again, and possible have another person take it on my behalf based on how they see me. I find the very idea rather attractive and it could lead to some very thought-provoking results. And maybe that’s just what I need.