Research since the 1970s has strongly supported self-awareness theory (Duval and Silvia 2001). When people focus attention on the self, they compare the self with standards, try harder to meet standards, and show stronger emotional responses to meeting or failing to meet a standard. The tendency to change the self to match a standard depends on other variables, particularly perceptions of how hard it will be to attain the standard. Remarkably, many experiments have shown that when people are not self-focused, their actions are often unrelated to their personal standards—self-awareness is needed for people to reduce disparities between their actions and their ideals.

Self-awareness theory was enriched by new research methods. According to the theory, anything that makes people focus attention on the self will increase self-awareness. Researchers accomplish this by placing people in front of large mirrors, videotaping them, having people listen to recordings of their voices, or making people feel like they stick out. Momentary levels of self-awareness are measured by people’s use of self-referential words and pronouns and by how quickly people recognize self-relevant information.

Self-awareness theory remains a fruitful and controversial theory. One new direction is the application of self-awareness theory to clinical disorders involving negative self-evaluation (e.g., depression) and excessive self-consciousness (e.g., social anxiety). One controversy, reviewed by Paul Silvia and Guido.

Gendolla (2001), is whether self-awareness enables accurate judgments of the self. Many researchers have proposed that self-awareness creates clearer perceptions of internal states, emotions, and traits. Other researchers, however, have noted that the self-concept is fluid, complex, and contextual—it is not a static object that can simply be apprehended and examined. Ironically, by making some aspects of the self especially salient, self-awareness may exaggerate and bias judgments of what the self is like.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duval, Shelley, and Robert A. Wicklund. 1972. A Theory of Objective Self Awareness. New York: Academic Press

Duval, Thomas Shelley, and Paul J. Silvia. 2001. Self-Awareness and Causal Attribution: A Dual Systems Theory. New York: Kluwer Academic Press.

Silvia, Paul J., and Guido H. E. Gendolla. 2001. On Introspection and Self-Perception: Does Self-Focused Attention Enable Accurate Self-Knowledge? Review of General Psychology 5: 241–269.

Visual learners, who learn best by using images, graphs, maps, and drawings

Auditory learners, who prefer to learn by hearing and speaking information

Tactile/Kinesthetic learners, who learn best by experiencing, touching, and actually performing tasks

With this theory in mind, it makes sense that children who have a specific learning style can learn more effectively if they use their preferred style more often.

However, there’s little or no scientific evidence that using a preferred learning modality improves a child’s performance. “What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality,” says psychologist Daniel T. Willingham. Content refers to the material, or what the student is learning. The modality that best fits the content is how the student learns. This means that students learn best when the modality fits the content, or the subject matter to be learned.

How to use the theory
You can help your child study for virtual school by applying the learning style that makes the most sense for the material. Help your child practice counting money by giving him or her real coins, which is a tactile/kinesthetic approach. To practice one-to-one correspondence with an emergent reader, point to each word as you read it, which uses both auditory and visual skills. To learn geography, study a map, which is a visual task. For vocabulary growth at any age, read aloud regularly—which is an auditory and verbal–linguistic experience as well as great fun.

Whether labeled as styles or intelligences, none of these strengths are static or fixed. Students grow and improve in all types of learning as they mature. Ultimately, it’s important to frequently check for learning comprehension and adapt the instruction to fit both the student and the content.

This interaction is influenced by the environment as well as students’ readiness (Krause et al., 2010) Therefore, teachers should construct an environment that provides students with challenges that are within their ‘zone of readiness’ by breaking down or scaffolding knowledge into manageable steps (Dann, 2014). 

However, this concept has been greatly critiqued in recent research and also by John Moody in the PD session he held at Silverdale because it can become a barrier to learning. 

Ultimately, ‘readiness’ will be different for different students (J. Moody, personal communication, January 29th, 2016; Silcock, 2013; Dann, 2014).