Aural Learning Style

Aural Learners = You prefer to have all of this page explained to you; it would be better if there was a downloadable sound file of someone reading these words. The written words are not as valuable as those you hear.

If you have a strong preference for Aural (A) learning, here are some suggestions for how to be successful in BIOL 198. Not all of these will work for everybody, but some of them will probably work for you.

INTAKE [How to get the material into your head] - Pay close attention to the introductory and wrap-up mini-lectures. Use a recording device. Discuss the studio manual material, and the experiments, with your lab partners. Discuss your understanding or your questions with the faculty members or the GTAs in the studio. Explain your understanding of the main points of the experiments to your lab partners. Describe the visual materials (overheads, slides, animations) to someone who wasn't there. Leave spaces in your studio manual for later "filling-in."

SWOT [Study without tears] - READ THE LIST OF OBJECTIVES OUT LOUD and then give a short (30 second) verbal summary of each objective from memory. This will allow you to figure out which objectives you are a bit hazy about. Do this again after you have studied for those objectives. Your lecture notes may be marginal because you prefer to listen. Talk to other students in the class and use their ideas and information to fill in the blank spaces. If you used a tape recorder, listen to the recordings of the introductory and mini-lectures. Ask others (preferably also aural learners) to listen to your explanation of each objective. Read your notes aloud, read the textbook aloud, describe the figures in the textbook aloud. Listen to another aural learner read and describe these three things as well. Go to the open studio hours and talk to the GTAs about the material. Ask them to listen to your explanations of the material, concentrating on the objectives. Ask them to explain verbally the important parts which are unclear to you.

OUTPUT [To perform well in the examination] - Talk to your professor or the GTA or the practicum student before the exam. Right before the exam, spend some time in a quiet place listening to the ideas and the explanations in your memory banks. Speak the questions and the answers (softly, please) as you go through the test.

If you are an Aural Learner, and have found some other strategies for being successful in this class, please let us know and we can update these paragraphs.