Interests and Learning Styles
1. Interest Inventories
Interest Inventories, Reading and Writing Surveys
Attitudes About Literacy and Learning
Reading and writing attitude surveys are simple ways to gather data about our students while garnering better behavior in social activities. They can give us a good indication of attitudes toward literacy and learning through administration of simple reading and writing questionnaires. Each questionnaire consists of 20 to 30 items that can be administered in whole class or in groups. They generally take about 10 minutes to administer, and students enjoy taking them because it is about their own preferences in a safe, non-judgmental venue. Norm-referenced tables are available as scoring aids to quantify results for grouping purposes.
The Internet is filled with interest and learning style inventories (learning style inventories are disussed next in this module). These inventories should be administered as early in the year as possible to appropriate materials, differentiate planning, allocate resources, and organize literature circle groups. Use of these inventories, one or all of them, can give us a wealth of information about our students to engage them with, while facilitating their academic success - it is a complete win/win!
In addition to the interest inventories named below, another way to find out about students' interests is to interview them. This can be time-consuming, but a nice way to confer and interact one-to-one with your students. Consider a paper and pencil survey, or create an electronic one using Google surveys, similar to what is housed below. Very young and/or struggling readers may need to have the questions read aloud to them. Here are some other tips for conducting personal interest surveys:
- Conduct a survey of reading interests in small groups.
- Collect five or six titles from the library from a few sources, folk tales, humor, fantasy, realistic fiction, etc.
- Display the books in front of the group and tell them you’re going to read the title and first page to see if they’re interested in the story or in reading it.
- After introducing the titles, read the first page of a selected book one-at-a-time and ask them to raise their hands if the story interests them. Use the fist to five approach, where a fist means not interested and five fingers raised means very interested.
Resources
Reading Interest Survey - basic
Reading Interest Survey – Google version
My Reading Preferences K-3 (see Course Objectives | Research | Materials folder)
Reading Attitude Survey, K-5 - Scholastic
Reading, Learning Style, and Attitude Interest Surveys
McKenna, M. C., & Kear, D.J. (1990). Elementary Reading Attitude Survey. From "Measuring attitudes toward reading: A new tool for teachers", The Reading Teacher, May 1990. International Reading Association, 800 Barksdale Road, Newark, DE 19714-8139.
Writing Attitude Survey:
Kear, D.J., Coffman, G.A., McKenna, M.C., & Ambrosio, A.L. (2000). Writing Attitude Survey. From: "Measuring attitude toward writing: a new tool for teachers", The Reading Teacher, 54.. International Reading Association, 800 Barksdale Road, Newark, DE 19714-8139.
Reading Styles Inventory
Carbo, M. (2003). Reading Styles Inventory. National Reading Styles Institute, Syosset, NY.