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Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments which motivate discovery and validation.

Commitments lead innovators to risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. He gives the example of Copernicus, who declared, contrary to our experience, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus first arrived at the truth of the Earth's true relation to the Sun not by following a method, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth."[3] What saves this approach from the charge of relativism is his conviction that tacit knowing connects us with objective realities.

Knowing more than we can say helps to explain how knowledge can be passed on within a tradition by non-explicit means, via apprenticeship i.e. a pupil improves their skills by observing a master.

They understand that collecting information and putting it on their blog is not a challenging task. They understand that an entry that paraphrases information found online is not as interesting and valuable as one that shows the author in the process of analyzing and reflecting on his or her research. Finally, they can see and understand how much effort is needed to produce an entry that makes a personal statement, that constitutes a valuable and unique contribution to the studied field. In other words, they now understand that in order to produce something uniquely their own, they first need to have a solid grasp of all the facts and spend some time reflecting on them and their own thoughts about their research.

Making Assessment Personally Relevant

Dunn, Deckinger, Withers & Katzenstein (1990), who found that teaching students based on their diagnosed learning style did significantly increase their achievement level (see also Napolitano 1986).

Research indicates learning style is not a stable construct, so one may alter instructional style to meet a learning style that will itself change, requiring a further change in instructional strategy.

Researchers have failed to address the question of how it is possible to achieve a tailoring of instructional approaches on anything other than an individual level.

What may be possible is to promote an educational environment developed for flexibility at the individual student level.

What is required is a stimulus-stimulus approach, where the student and the lecturer are actively involved in both learning and the mechanics of the learning process, the aim being to facilitate learner empowerment by developing in students a critical awareness of material studied and the delivery and structure of the material. Learners can then tailor flexible education strategies to their requirements to optimise the quality of the learning experience.

his ability of an individual to actively select from a personal style or skills portfolio, is part of what can be termed self-directed learning

In an educational setting, a self-directed learner no longer operates as a passive receiver of information, but takes responsibility for the achievement, and ultimately setting, of learning outcomes. In essence, the traditional lecturer-student divide becomes increasingly blurred, as the learner begins to pro-actively structure the programme to match their own learning attributes.

facilitator, and finally to that of a resource to be tapped

lecturer's role

Under such an approach, higher education ceases to be simply something that is done to people, and becomes a platform from which individuals can go on to, in effect, educate themselves

"causer of learning".

This approach will tend to create learned helplessness in people

Higher education should be concerned with not only enhancing learning in a specific situation, but should also constitute a catalyst for further self-initiated development of the individual, above and beyond the contents and aims of a particular course. T

The lecturer must avoid removing traditional barriers to self-direction, such as a rigid programme structure, only to erect new barriers through the use of prescriptive self-direction strategies imposed on the student.

allow the individual the freedom to define and devise learning strategies, and to make mistakes. T

The role of the lecturer must be essentially non-interventionist, unless the student seeks guidance

as people may still not choose to direct their own learning due to: a lack of belief in their own ability, a failure by them to recognise that self-direction is needed or preferable, the setting of an inappropriate learning goal(s) that fails to act as a motivator, and previous learning and education experiences.

That educational system primarily tends to concentrate on didactic approaches that often view learning as being of secondary importance to memory, where information acquisition and subsequent information regurgitation predominate.

This will require that the lecturer breaks down barriers to learning and self-direction that may be present. This covers: those barriers created by the student during the course (wrong choice of learning approach, poor motivation, lack of confidence), those barriers that the course itself may indirectly create (lack of flexibility, lack of direction and guidance, poor structure), and those barriers that the student brings to the course (reason for attending the course, poor learning skills, previous bad learning experiences).

In the initial stages of a programme, the lecturer will need to ensure the existence of an appropriate control structure, as students undergo the transition from being other-directed in their learning by external influences, to being self-directed.

caffold structure

clearly communicated and understood aims and objectives for the students at regular intervals.

allows students to progressively take control of their learning,

but that also offers sufficient guidance and direction in the early stages to prevent individuals from becoming lost.

The application of learning style theory in higher education teaching

Importantly, they saw that CK and SK scores were not related to performance and thus concluded that 'ways of knowing' were more reflective of a learning style or approach rather than a reflection of ability or intellectual capacity (Gallotti et al., 1999)

Baxter Magolda (1992) describes ways of knowing as being "related to, but not dictated by gender" (p.8)

Students' separate knowing and connected knowing scores, however, did predict preferences for different kinds of teaching.

Separate knowing scores were always higher in males whereas females had always higher connected knowing scores. The connected and separate knowing scores of males were not significantly different, whereas females typically showed significantly higher connected scores.

, learning occurs in different ways for different people in different situations, and may be affected by the learning styles of others who are present. According to Gallotti et al. (1999), students tend to prefer teachers whose style reflects their own. Schommer-Aikens and Easter (2006) find it likely that teachers' personal epistemological paradigms would impact on their decisions about forms of instruction, curriculum and evaluation. Should this be the case, an awareness on the part of the teacher and the learners of the predominant or favoured ways of knowing within a learning context might be seen as a useful tool in designing classroom activities which take into account student diversity.

Emphasis is placed upon its use as a "more authentic tool for curriculum planning, instructional delivery and assess

Metacomprehension. T

Self-Regulation.

They focus their attention on what it is that they or someone else does that is metacognitively useful. T

Learners with good metacognitive skills are able to monitor and direct their own learning processes.

They establish a motivation to learn a metacognitive process.

metacognition often has important affective or personality component

Students typically learn metacognitive skills while they are involved in learning something else