The Visual-Spatial Learner

I am very interested in this area right now. Working at late night hours to read all the relevant articles. May be, just may be, others interested to know too.  

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The Visual-Spatial Learner:
An Introduction

Linda Kreger Silverman. Ph.D.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the visual-spatial learner! We’re excited to share with you information about this important learning style, and to share with you about recognizing, assessing, teaching, counseling and living with visual-spatial learners.

The visual-spatial learner model is based on the newest discoveries in brain research about the different functions of the hemispheres. The left hemisphere is sequential, analytical, and time-oriented. The right hemisphere perceives the whole, synthesizes, and apprehends movement in space. We only have two hemispheres, and we are doing an excellent job teaching one of them. We need only become more aware of how to reach the other, and we will have happier students, learning more effectively.

I’d like to share with you how the visual-spatial learner idea originated. Around 1980, I began to notice that some highly gifted children took the top off the IQ test with their phenomenal abilities to solve items presented to them visually or items requiring excellent abilities to visualize. These children were also adept at spatial tasks, such as orientation problems. Soon I discovered that not only were the highest scorers outperforming others on the visual-spatial tasks, but so were the lowest scorers.
The main difference between the two groups was that highly gifted children also excelled at the auditory-sequential items, whereas children who were brighter than their IQ scores had marked auditory and sequential weaknesses. It was from these clinical observations and my attempt to understand both the strengths and weaknesses that the concept of the "visual-spatial learner" was born.

Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than in words. They have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners. They learn better visually than auditorally. They learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent. They do not learn from repetition and drill. They are whole-part learners who need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means that they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach. They arrive at correct solutions without taking steps, so "show your work" may be impossible for them. They may have difficulty with easy tasks, but show amazing ability with difficult, complex tasks. They are systems thinkers who can orchestrate large amounts of information from different domains, but they often miss the details. They tend to be organizationally impaired and unconscious about time. They are often gifted creatively, technologically, mathematically or emotionally.

You can tell you have one of these children by the endless amount of time they spend doing advanced puzzles, constructing with Legos, etc., completing mazes, counting everything, playing Tetris on the computer, playing chess, building with any materials at hand, designing scientific experiments, programming your computer, or taking everything in the house apart to see how it operates. They also are very creative, dramatic, artistic and musical.

Here are the basic distinctions between the visual-spatial and auditory-sequential learner:

AUDITORY-SEQUENTIAL	VISUAL-SPATIAL
Thinks primarily in words	Thinks primarily in pictures
Has auditory strengths	Has visual strengths
Relates well to time	Relates well to space
Is a step-by-step learner	Is a whole-part learner
Learns by trial and error	Learns concepts all at once
Progresses sequentially from easy to difficult material	Learns complex concepts easily; struggles with easy skills
Is an analytical thinker	Is a good synthesizer
Attends well to details	Sees the big picture; may miss details
Follows oral directions well	Reads maps well
Does well at arithmetic	Is better at math reasoning than computation
Learns phonics easily	Learns whole words easily
Can sound out spelling words	Must visualize words to spell them
Can write quickly and neatly	Prefers keyboarding to writing
Is well-organized	Creates unique methods of organization
Can show steps of work easily	Arrives at correct solutions intuitively
Excels at rote memorization	Learns best by seeing relationships
Has good auditory short-term memory	Has good long-term visual memory
May need some repetition to reinforce learning	Learns concepts permanently; is turned off by drill and repetition
Learns well from instruction	Develops own methods of problem solving
Learns in spite of emotional reactions	Is very sensitive to teachers’ attitudes
Is comfortable with one right answer	Generates unusual solutions to problems
Develops fairly evenly	Develops quite asynchronously
Usually maintains high grades	May have very uneven grades
Enjoys algebra and chemistry	Enjoys geometry and physics
Learns languages in class	Masters other languages through immersion
Is academically talented	Is creatively, mechanically, emotionally, or technologically gifted
Is an early bloomer	Is a late bloomer

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Thank you for drop by.

Spot the brainiac

Greg Callaghan 

From: The Australian

June 18, 2011

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SNAP quiz: who's the best judge of whether a child is gifted or not: their parents or their teachers?

Answer: their parents – by a huge margin. Parents are between 66 per cent and 100 per cent accurate in spotting giftedness in their child, while for teachers, the figure hovers at a humiliating 4-10 per cent, as borne out by a raft of recent surveys. “Parents see their kids performing a range of tasks in a variety of contexts, while teachers would be lucky to get one lecture on gifted children during their entire training,” says Dr Louise Porter, a respected child psychologist and education expert based in Queensland.

Porter’s research has helped demolish many of the myths about gifted children, most notably that parents rosily overestimate their offspring’s intelligence. While the exact meaning of the term “gifted child” has been a source of heated debate, most experts now agree that they total no more than 3-5 per cent of the child population. Gifted kids have high IQs, ace their peers on other standardised tests, and are usually high achievers in most fields (maths, language, science, music) because of the sheer processing speed of their brains, a product of their genetic inheritance. It’s been found that parents with a tertiary education have a one in 10 chance of having a gifted child, while for those who never finished high school (because of a lack of academic ability, not economic hardship), the figure drops to about one in 10,000.

And it seems the 21st century’s digital world is giving birth to a new type of gifted child. “This is the first generation of children learning by means other than listening,” notes Porter. “A mother of two from Hong Kong recently came to me; she knew her young daughter was gifted but was worried about her son, who she suspected might be autistic. It turned out both children had an IQ of 140 – the boy was visually gifted, the girl language gifted.” The next masters of the universe may well be the visual learners, Porter says: engineers, architects, film directors, sculptors.

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