Student Learning Identities: Developing a Learning Taxonomy for the Political Science Classroom

Abstract

The present article uses Q-Method to uncover, what we refer to as, learning identities in an undergraduate core political science course. The term “learning identities” is employed to highlight the self-referential quality of the learning perspectives revealed in the Q-Sorting exercise. Drawing on a set of 41 objectivist statements derived from the broad field of learning style inventories, a taxonomy of five distinct learning identities is described and discussed below. These include: Adept Learners, Traditionalists, Obliged Pupils, Apathetic Pupils, and Objective Learners. After describing these ideal-typical learner self-conceptions, the authors discuss how this knowledge can be a valuable tool for college and university political science faculty, informing such efforts as curriculum development and instructional approaches. Although learning style inventories have long been a part of the pedagogical literature, few attempts have been made to unify the varying measures of personality type, information-processing approaches, and environmental preferences into a single self-referential tool, and fewer approaches still have sought to focus such a tool specifically on the task of teaching politics at the undergraduate level. The present article seeks to contribute to the task of filling this void.