Kinesthetic Learning Style

Kinesthetic Learners = You want to experience the exam so that you can understand it. The ideas on this page are only valuable if they sound practical, real, and relevant to you. You need to do things to understand. You will like the "kitchen utensil tournament" in Module 1, and will probably enjoy the Gene Action Model in Module 4.

If you have a strong preference for Kinesthetic (K) 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] - Use all your senses to take in the information in the studio classroom. Volunteer for demonstrations or to answer questions using the visual presenter at the podium. Be active in setting up the experiments at your table (e.g. pipetting the solutions into the tubes, finding the cells in the microscope). Pay close attention to the demonstrations (e.g., pH, respiration, relative size of organelles) and go up and examine these when you have time during class. Use the interactive computer simulations to understand (by trial and error, if necessary) how these simulations are supposed to resemble real-life situations. Ask the instructors for concrete applications of the abstract principles you are trying to learn. Engage your lab partners in all of these activities.

SWOT [Study without tears] - MAKE A LIST OF THE OBJECTIVES and see if you can provide a concrete example or real-life application for each one. Ask your studio instructors for help on this if you can't come up with one for each objective. Your lecture notes may be marginal because the topics did not seem concrete or relevant enough to you. Use examples, case studies, applications etc to make them more concrete. Pay attention to the sections of the textbook or online material that attempt to convert your biological knowledge to real-life usefulness. Use drawings or pictures to illustrate an idea. Go to the open studio hours and ask the GTAs for concrete examples or case studies to help you learn difficult concepts. While you are there, look at the available demonstrations again. Look for similar simulations or multimedia approaches on the links available from the "additional web resources" page.

OUTPUT [To perform well in the examination] - Some of the questions on the exams will be over the actual experimental details of the activities in the studio, so you will be prepared for those and you should do well on that subset of questions. The other questions will take a bit more work. Write paragraphs, using concrete examples if available, for each objective. Teach the material, using demonstrations, pictures, or diagrams if available, to someone else.

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