December 2007

Use the LSI for IEPs and Get a "Whoa!" Out of Your Students

Insight School of Washington, Anne Teresa Urquhart, Special Education Coordinator

How do parents and students respond when the results of a student's Learning Style Inventory (LSI) are shared with them? Parents: "You really nailed it." Students: "Whoa!"

What's a Learning Style Inventory (LSI)? It's a Bridges tool offered through the Digital Learning Commons. The LSI asks students questions to determine how they best learn and results in data that helps teachers tailor their teaching to individual students' needs.

At Insight School of Washington, every student takes the LSI as part of orientation, including special education students. Anne Teresa Urquhart, the Special Education Coordinator at Insight, shared the above quotes with the DLC. She goes over LSI results with each student and his or her parents as part of the student's IEP (Individual Education Program).

LSI an eye opener

"When I go over the LSI, the parents and kids look at me in shock and awe. It's an eye opener," Urquhart says. "The LSI also helps me understand how to meet the student’s learning needs and to give them pointers on how they can help themselves learn the material."

Urquhart offers the following examples:

• Tactile students can run their finger under the text to aid learning.
• Kinesthetic students benefit from full mobility.
• Some ADHD students work better in dim lighting and get distracted by bright lights.

Quiet library environment or group work?

Urquhart says that when she worked in brick-and-mortar schools, her students were always asking to go to the library to work. She never really knew if they wanted to go for the quiet or to chitchat with friends.

"When you have this kind of information from the LSI, you can sort your class," Urquhart says. For example, students who benefit from quiet can go to the library to work on a project while students who do well in groups can stay in the classroom to collaborate.

Who motivates your students?

Urquhart says of the LSI: "I think it's pretty cool. Especially things like scores in persistence, motivation, and responsibility."

What motivates a student: parents or teachers? Urquhart says, "If it's parents, then it's important for the teacher to have a good relationship with that student's parents. If it's teachers, then a teacher knows that building a positive relationship is important for the student's success. If it's neither the parent nor the teacher, then the teacher needs to find intrinsic motivations to help the student learn."

The LSI also helps teachers determine how much information a student needs to move forward. Urquhart explains: "There are some kids who if you give them an assignment they'll figure out what they need to do on their own. There are others who if they don't have enough information, they'll just freeze up and procrastinate. So the Bridges LSI will also tell you that: how much detail and how much structure individual students need."

What time of day does a student learn best?

"Whether students are a morning, afternoon, or evening person comes across strongly in the LSI too," Urquhart says. For students who are afternoon people, for example, Urquhart suggests they work with their counselor to schedule their toughest subject for the afternoon and their easiest subject for the morning.

Online students, like Insight students, can use this information to decide when to work on which subject during the day, since they can do their coursework as early, or as late, as they want.

"There's a wealth of information in the Learning Styles. It's beneficial to everyone: counselors can use it, teachers can use it," Urquhart says. "If you have students that you need to put on a learning plan because of No Child Left Behind, there's a lot of good information there that you can include in that learning plan that can help both the students and parents at home."

Getting up to speed on the LSI

Urquhart recommends that administrators train teachers to use the LSI with real students. She suggests that teachers choose five students representing the full spectrum—from students who are really struggling at the low end to students who are doing really well at the high end.

Once those five students have taken the LSI, teachers should go over the results together. "It's much easier to see how the LSI works if you use it initially with students you've worked with for a few months. The LSI sheds light on things you may not have thought about and validates other things."

Urquhart adds in closing: "It's like 'whoa' not only for the students but for the teachers too."

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