Feedback on alternative “learning style” model. Tailoring learning by modifying where to start in the abstraction layers.

I am a high school student, and I have long been told about the different learning styles (kinesthetic, reader, auditory, etc…). I’ve always struggled with this concept and I have constructed an idea that may be an (admittedly immature) alternative.

It appears to me based upon my limited experience, that people learn best when they start on a different level of abstraction, somewhat dictated by cognitive ability. This is probably not a very good description of the concept, so let me provide an example or two.

A sample of people are trying to learn how to program a niche application. There are multiple layers of knowledge needed: basic computer science concepts, basic syntactical knowledge, functional knowledge of how to construct larger programs, knowledge of the niche topic for which the program is made, and sufficient knowledge of the app concept to create an implementation.

The traditional high-school method is to start by teaching basic concepts, basic syntactical knowledge, and then to move down the list, starting at the lowest level of abstraction. I have ventured into this specific example in my own personal time, and I was confused for a long long time and was never able to grasp low-level concepts. I then had the idea to start from the step of "functional knowledge of how to construct larger programs". Learn about how programs are constructed at a high abstraction, then learn more and more specifics about the actual language. When following this strategy, I learned how programs are structured, and I had a place to "slot in" the low-level knowledge. It ended up being significantly faster for me, and I learned a lot more. Some people may need to start at layer one, two, three, or even the highest level abstraction.

Another example is math, you learn arithmetic, algebra, then stats, calc, and all the other more challenging disciplines. For myself and I think most, arithmetic was a great place to start, but I always struggled with algebra. I'm genuinely not very good at it, I cannot factor very well, and I struggle. I recently took an online class on stats and pre-calc. I found myself learning more about algebra than I ever did when I was learning just the low-level concepts (factoring and all that stuff). I was unable to learn the topic unless I had an overarching framework in which it was implemented.

Some of this could be mediated by cognitive ability. I would never be able to start programming by learning on a specific niche application, but I'm sure someone can. In the same breath, I could never start by learning variable calculus, but I'm sure someone can.

I kind of just want to bounce this idea around and see where it goes, I understand in a classroom setting this may not be the most practical, but on a theoretical level, what do you guys think? I wanted some feedback from people more experienced. Thanks!

Side note: excuse the bad articulation, I have yet to develop the skills required to communicate ideas like this well, so its quite verbose and might not be the most clear.

Submitted July 26, 2021 at 07:58AM by amag420 https://ift.tt/2WnFvEr