Student Profiles: Gathering Information about Students to Inform Instruction

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Carol Ann Tomlinson (2009) stresses the importance of understanding students’ interests, intelligence preferences, and learning styles in order to design learning experiences that will make the most of their strengths. One way to begin to understand new students as individuals is to employ surveys or inventories to gather information about their interests, learning styles, intelligence preferences, and other traits and conditions that may affect how they learn.


As I looked for interest surveys, I began to understand that one must have some understanding of the students for whom it will be used. For example, surveys should be age or grade appropriate. They should also be designed in a way that does not reflect false assumptions about the range of students’ interests. Many of my students, for example, probably would not know how to answer a question about which weekly news periodicals they prefer, but might give revealing responses to a more open-ended question about how they get their news. Interest surveys should also yield information that will be useful. I am not sure how I could use information about a student’s favorite color (although students inevitably share this in their September autobiographical essays or biographical essays about peers), but as an English teacher, I am certainly interested in the movies, stories, music, and even video games they prefer. As I browsed through search results, I found a couple of surveys that seemed fairly appropriate for my needs, but none was a perfect fit. Scholastic has a good general interest survey in PDF form at http://teacher.scholastic.com/LessonPlans/unit_roadtosuccess_invent.pdf. I could use this, but I might reword some questions, such as “My favorite book is…” to reflect a broader range of interests that might inform my decisions regarding literature we will read and our approaches to it. A group of English teachers from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom who host a site called EnglishClub.com posted an interest survey for English language learners at http://edition.englishclub.com/tefl-magazine/student-interest-survey/ that asks some questions that I might use to enhance my own version. There were prompts I really liked on the Scholastic survey, such as “If I were surprised with a gift of $1,000 cash, I would use it to…,” and I really liked some of EnglishClub.com’s questions like “Go back to yesterday for a moment. What was the best part of your day?” I can imagine that students’ answers to these questions could reveal much about what they value and enjoy and this, in turn, could inform my planning. All of the interest surveys I liked allowed students to respond in their own words. Although information from these may be harder to tabulate, the individual responses are likely to be much more revealing.

To get specific information about how my students learn, I can administer a learning styles survey. I found that these tend, more often, to be forced-choice format. Again, I found I liked prompts from a couple of surveys, particularly North Carolina State’s Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire authored by Barbara Soloman and Richard Felder at http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html and The Center for New Discoveries in Learning’s The Personal Learning Styles Inventory for Students at http://www.howtolearn.com/lsinventory_student.html. The first, from Solomon and Felder, presents opposing pairs of learning styles, asking students to choose between them. The second, from the Center for New Discoveries in Learning, presents a list of learning preferences and asks students to check all that apply. I would like to use some questions from the first, but prefer the format of the second, so that students need not feel forced by either-or pairings to choose between options.

For assessing intelligence preferences, I liked the questions on the survey presented by the Learning Disabilities Resource Community at http://www.ldrc.ca/projects/miinventory/mitest.html, but am concerned that, by grouping prompts according to intelligences, it may unduly influence students’ responses. So I think my inventory will emulate more the style of Literacyworks’ survey at http://literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html, which does not identify the intelligences associated with prompts until after all responses have been completed.

Carol Ann Tomlinson (2009) explains “learning profile” as a collective term used to refer to learning style, intelligence preference, gender, culture, and other factors influencing learning. This seems to indicate that a good learning profile survey should include, among other things, elements of the surveys I have previously discussed. Gender, culture, and other differences also have an influence on how students approach learning and respond to different types of learning experiences, so in addition to the information about interests, learning style, and intelligence preference that I will gather with prompts I have already found or created, and determinations about readiness I will make from analysis of diagnostic assessments, I will add to my comprehensive student survey prompts designed to elicit biographical information that may be influential in designing learning experiences (Bray, Brown, & Green, 2004; Tomlinson, 2009). Searching for an appropriate learning profile inventory is challenging because, as Tomlinson (2009) warns, many use the terms “learning style,” “intelligence preference,” and “learning profile” interchangeably. The Webster Groves School District in Webster, Missouri posted a fairly comprehensive learning profile inventory at http://schools.webster.k12.mo.us/education/page/download.php?fileinfo=NGxlYXJuZXJwcm9maWxlcy1tb2QtdHJpLU1JLXRyaS5wZGY6Ojovd3d3L3NjaG9vbHMvc2MvcmVtb3RlL2ltYWdlcy9kb2NtZ3IvMTkyM2ZpbGU5MjAxLnBkZg. Although this clearly reflects a more holistic approach to understanding students, and may be a model for my overall survey, it still seems to neglect potentially important information such as family culture, socio-economic status, access to resources, and gender.

None of these documents alone can reveal everything I will need to know about new students. Perhaps this goal is too lofty for any one survey, but I have attempted to create an inventory, hosted by http://www.surveymonkey.com/ and incorporating elements of all of the surveys I have examined, that will help me design learning experiences to meet my students’ learning needs. I have embedded this as a pop-up on my blog, 3sty Minds at http://3styminds.blogspot.com/2010/11/student-inventory-survey.html.


References


Bray, M., Brown, A., & Green, T. (2004). Technology and the Diverse Learner: A Guide to Classroom Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.


Tomlinson, C. (2009). Learning profiles and achievement. School Administrator. 66(2), 28–33. Retrieved from Education Research Complete database.