Know Yourself. Discover your Learning Style”. An innovative activity in undergraduate education

According to educational, pedagogical and neuroscience researches, individuals learn in a different way following a particular form or style of relation with the external world and with learning. We are all involved in a continuous process of learning and it is very useful to find out the way we learn analyzing which styles prevail and how to develop those styles less used. For about two years at the University of Camerino, we have been working in the field of pedagogical investigations and exploring learning methodologies. These studies, developed as part of PhD research in development of new approaches to teaching and learning sciences, led to a collaboration with two Spanish leading experts, Catalina Alonso and Domingo Gallego, at UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia). Their theoretic framework indicate the existence of 4 learning styles or learning phases that generate knowledge: active, reflective, theoretical, pragmatic. A free training activity entitled "Know yourself. Discover your learning styles" was designed from the analyses of case-studies relating learning styles of undergraduate students of Nutritional Biology course. The specific objective of this activity was to support students in their own way of learning and thinking through various strategies and techniques in order to reduce the large number of dropouts in scientific study courses and to improve their academic performance. This paper illustrates the results obtained by this activity, carried out in collaboration with guidance and tutoring services of the University of Camerino. The peculiarity of this activity is the introduction of students in an innovative way of learning strategies developed with the educational methodology of learning styles. The activity has been designed and carried out on a “Moodle” e­learning platform to provide essential tools that aim to exercise critical thinking, using a metacognitive path. The activity encourages students towards self-evaluation and self-instruction, and promotes as instrument of reflection the questionnaire CAMEA 40 (Cuestionario Adaptado para Monitorizar Estilos de Aprendizaje) developed by the research group of Madrigal (Politecnico Colombiano Jaime Isaza) and Trujillo (Universidad de Granada, Spain). This questionnaire provides the profile to be associated with the above discussed 4 learning styles. According to Alonso and Gallego, each learning style can be classified as follow: very high, high, intermediate, low, very low. The activity on the Moodle platform, which is divided in 6 modules, aims to improve all learning styles, according to the fact that a quality learning occurs only if the 4 styles are employed in the best possible way. The theory of learning styles, the contents of the proposed activity (study materials, videos, questionnaires, tests and forums) and the use of the platform are illustrated through a seminar carried out before the virtual course. The first edition of “Know yourself. Discover your learning styles” involved 79 students attending 3 different Schools of the University of Camerino. The activity has allowed to make both quantitative and qualitative observations. In this work we intend to find out students learning styles and to compare the results in terms of correlation between the adopted learning styles and the courses attended. Keywords: Learning styles, Metacognition, E-learning, Undergraduate education.