Article Review
Clarke III, Flaherty, & Yankey, (2006) in the work titled "Teaching the Visual Learner: The Use of Visual Summaries in Marketing Education” discovered that all students are not equal. Therefore, there was a need for teachers to implement different learning strategies that will equalize students’ performance. The authors observed that 40% of the overall college students are visual learners. This approximated number of students preferred learning through diagrams, pictures, videos, as well as demonstrations.
However, marketing mostly relies on written or spoken words when presenting their content. If teachers do not recognize and differentiate the students well, then some might underperform due to lack of proper teaching methods. Therefore, the authors stressed that visual instructions would significantly help the visual learners in performing well in their studies since there will be consistency between teachers' teaching styles and students' learning styles. The overall purpose of the study was aimed at investigating how the use of visual summaries helped the visual learners in learning and improving their overall performance. The findings revealed that students showed excellent performance on specific marketing topics when teachers incorporated visual summaries in the teaching process.
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Summary of the Main Idea
As per the article, visual summaries are the major players enhancing learning process among visual learners. The way that the visual learners learn is interesting since they mostly rely on what they see or hear. Through drawings, building, creating and inventing, the visual learners can learn and comprehend. In other words, all the mentioned ways serve as how they can process all information they absorb.
In most cases, the visual learners love reading books and in particular books with pictures as well as drawing and text to get the information that they need. They also apply these methods of learning when passing information in most cases. Teachers and parents should be aware that visual learners are very much engaged when studying using colors and diagrams. Therefore, they should acknowledge that they learn best when they are watching videos, reading, teacher handouts and demonstrations. Henceforth the best teaching strategy when it comes to visual learners is to apply the multisensory teaching strategies that will significantly benefit them.
Introduction
The article seems to agree with the fact that all students are not the same, and they learn in different ways. Having this in mind, the teachers should be able to incorporate the method known as multisensory instruction which covers all the learning aspects to activate the different parts of the brain. This will aid in making learning possible for all the students despite their differences. The multisensory instructions cover all the aspects of learning. These aspects include visual (seeing it), auditory (hearing it) and kinesthetic (doing it) therefore coving every student (Richland, 2018). This is generally what the article covers concerning the topic of marketing education. The report outlines that some of the students are better at processing words, while others are good at processing pictures as they see them. In almost every classroom, it is most likely for one to find both visual and verbal learners, but most are the times when some topics are not addressed with visual instructional cues. Therefore, if proper learning strategies are incorporated, then no records of underperforming students in marketing classes would be identified.
Article Analysis
According to Clarke III, Flaherty, & Yankey, (2006), the best and most likely the only possible way of successfully reaching out to the visual learners is through what is known as a visual summary. This is the act of providing visual diagrams and educational videos that summarizes the linkages between the learning materials. These diagrams will offer a visual summary that will be easy for them to understand hence comprehend what is being taught. Additionally, the usage of pictures serves as the road map illustrating the relationships between various confusing points that will be readily understood visually. This study provides evidence that some people simply depend on visual summaries to recognize something. This serves as their key to their memory. This fact of visual learners learning through sight or what they see makes the pictorial depictions of the materials central to mind (Clarke III, Flaherty, & Yankey, 2006). Therefore, if the teacher wants to pass an important message or point, then they are advised to use visual summaries to aid the learner in storing the message. Therefore, their memory relies more on what is visible to them to be able to store messages that are passed by the visible pictures.
The method used in this study involved a sample of learners who were randomly chosen in two concurrent undergraduate principles of marketing courses from a local institution. The reason as to why this principle class of marketing was chosen is because it is a course that is offered by a wide number of marketing departments while at the same time covering a wide range of topics. All the sections were scheduled to be meeting at a consecutive point of 50 minutes in each session. The study was taking place on three days in a week across a 16-week semester. Most of the students were found to be falling under the age of 21-years-old, and most of them were working on a part-time basis. They were additionally found to be taking 15 credit hours every semester. In the first group, the class which contained 16 females and 18 male students was only given textbooks, lectures and class handouts. This means that it was marked as a traditional class. On the other hand, there was the other class which consisted of 17 males and 18 female students were provided with visual summaries to aid in their learning process (Clarke III, Flaherty, & Yankey, 2006). In other words, both of the classes were treated the same way in terms of learning and examinations.
The findings of the study indicated that a total number of approximately 44% of the students were visual learners who were relying on what they saw to comprehend what the teacher was teaching. The study also proved that those students who were provided with both visual materials and verbal annotations were scoring higher on comprehension. On the other hand, the teachers were discouraged from overloading the visual learners with excessive text which would interfere with what they have visually been learning hence overloading the visual information-processing channels. Finally, the exams were all combined, and the average score was determined between the two classes, which showed a significant difference (Clarke III, Flaherty, & Yankey, 2006). The difference indicated that those who were exposed to visuals performed better in their marketing exam than the other class.
Conclusion
According to the authors, if proper instructional techniques are applied following the students' learning style, the student will be able to learn and retain more. Additionally, the findings indicated that marketing students could significantly improve in their studies if proper visual summaries are included in their learning style to aid in a better understanding of what is being taught. Therefore, visual summaries can generally be used in supplementing the traditional way of learning and make learning better and simple for most students. However, further studies and correct positioning needs to be considered in order to provide the best teaching techniques.
References
Clarke III, I., Flaherty, T. B., & Yankey, M. (2006). Teaching the visual learner: The use of visual summaries in marketing education. Journal of Marketing Education, 28 (3), 218-226.
Richland, K. (2018). The visual learner. PRIDE Reading Program . Retrieved on 11 November 2019, from https://pridereadingprogram.com/the-visual-learner/
