What this New Zealand inspector of schools and his American colleagues Chuck Bonwell and Peter Hurd, both of the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy, want you to grasp right from the start is that the VARK instrument is not another personality or learning styles inventory. Once you understand the caveats, they will gladly tell you what VARK is, how they use it, and the positive affects it seems to have effected in their classes. Briefly, VARK is a set of thirteen multiple-choice questions designed to reveal a student's preferred modes of receiving and working with information. If the responsibility for learning has really always lain with the student, the awareness derived from VARK merely highlights for students the tools they already like to use and how to use them better.
Intake covers advice on grappling with the information as the student encounters it in class.
For example, the strategies advise aural learners to explain new ideas to other people and to use a tape recorder, among other things. The SWOT strategies take the place of the generalized study tips often found in books on becoming a successful student. Output strategies focus on performing well on exams. An exchange of faxes with Fleming when the Forum caught up with him in Fiji last month drove this point home. I would hazard a guess that your VARK scores would be heavily oriented towards a high R score because of the way you used words in that presentation and because of your present work with the National Teaching and Learning Forum.