Alan Phelps, director of the Center on Education and Work and professor of educational administration and vocational education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, talks about appealing to the learning modalities or the multiple intelligences of students. Excerpted from NCREL's Rural Audio Journal (Vol. 2, No. 3), From School to Work--and Back Again: Apprenticeships for Rural Students (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1994).
"There has been a lot of research done in the are of cognitive psychology that suggests that if you connect up these various subject matters in ways that really make good logic sense that achievement is better and kids comprehend, kids have more mobility and more choices and usually wind up with better paying positions in the work place. William T Grant foundations issued a report about four years ago describing the neglected majority and indicating that there are multiple intelligences which people use in schooling as well as in everyday life and that people can learn things in the process of doing something as well as they can learn something substantive by sitting in a conventional classroom or reading a textbook, and what we've got to do is figure out ways in which to appeal to the learning modalities or the multiple intelligence of a much broader range of kids than we have ."