Unfortunately---in part because teachers tend to favor their own learning
styles, in part because they instinctively teach the way they were taught
in most college classes---the teaching style in most lecture courses tilts
heavily toward the small percentage of college students who are at once
intuitive, verbal, deductive, reflective and sequential. This imbalance
puts a sizeable fraction of the student population at a disadvantage.
Laboratory courses, being inherently sensory, visual, and active, could in
principle compensate for a portion of the imbalance; however, most labs
involve primarily mechanical exercises that illustrate only a minor subset
of the concepts presented in lecture and seldom provide significant
insights or skill development. Sensing, visual, inductive, active, and
global learners thus rarely get their educational needs met in science
courses.