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HUMAN LEARNING -
NATURAL DRIFT TO LOOSE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
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 Entered
20/05/03 SCIENTIFIC
EVIDENCE FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING MODEL AMONGST BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS. It is now been clearly proven that knowledge workers have atleast one of four established learning styles that they need to understand and capitalise on. Loo collated valid data from eight studies including his own ('meta-analysis') totalling a large sample size of 1,791 students to validly determine business learning style preferences. He was then able to validly determine learning style differences between certain professional groups including Accountants, Finance Managers and Marketers. KM practitioners need to understand this theoretical grounding to then design effective learning and communication vehicles for their staff. Without it, any KM initiative is guesswork and likely to be flawed. Experiential learning is the predominant human learning model espoused by learning experts, taking on a social constructivist view of life-long learning (see KM Tutorials for more). Loo used David Kolb's established Learning Styles Questionnaire that elucidates a professional's dominant learning style out of a possible four. What would he find ? Do business professionals particularly gravitate to one of the four learning styles as illustrated in the hypothetical diagrams below ? This
is a unique business study because it compiles not only one's
own research but seven other valid research studies into one summative
study. This 'meta-analysis' is often used to obtain a statistically
large enough sample size to make valid conclusions. It is often
used in healthcare research to determine effects of medications
or other interventions on a patient's health. For minimising reader
bias, a description of the learning styles will be left after
viewing the following results to the study. The four learning
styles will temporarily be named respectively... RESULTS
View Overlapping Slides Orientation. Learning Styles Description: Alpha (orange) - Accomodator style, people who primarily learn from "hands-on" experience and "gut" feelings rather than from logical analysis. Beta (purple) - Diverger style, people who primarily learn from viewing their concrete experiences from many points of view. Gamma (brown) - Assimilator, people who primarily consider various view points and formulate new ideas, principles and theories from them. Delta (red) - Convergers, people who learn primarily by testing theories in practical ways. Business students had a relatively even spread of learning styles. There is a significant difference within and between the various business majors regarding learning style preferences. Finance major students preferred Assimilation more than Diverging. Accounting major students preferred Converging more than Accomodation. Marketing major students preferred both Converging and Diverging although there were no significant differences amongst the learning style preferences here. Nevertheless, all four learning style preferences were strongly represented within each business major. Loo postulates that rather than teachers and students be focused on their own preferred style of learning, all four styles should be developed in the knowledge worker.
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