Speak Out OCTOBER 2021 DIGITAL EDITION

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Fig 1

Visual learning for speech pathology students

When speech pathology student Tracy van Heyk needed help to digest information for her studies she turned to her creative side and created drawings to aid with visual learning. Tracy, with her lecturer Roger Newman from James Cook University, share how these aids could be helpful for other students.

When learning, it is essential that a student obtains a full understanding to be able to grasp the concept of “normal” and transfer this to the “abnormal” or “disordered”. Learning styles are individual, with some preferring the written word, and others favouring the auditory, kinaesthetic, or visual methods, or a combination of all four. Anatomy is usually taught in the foundational year of a healthcare degree program, with frequent reference back to it in subjects that follow. Being able to remember what a particular structure is and what it is responsible for is therefore essential, and if understanding the written word is not favoured, other ways need to be sought. One such way is drawing, described by Quillin and Thomas (2015) as the learning outcomes obtained from creating visual observations of showing a particular structure and

potentially its physiological process using two-dimensional images. Research conducted which compared the four learning styles above concluded that the method of drawing alone can improve comprehension (Joewono et al. 2018). As a student speech pathologist at James Cook University, Tracy van Reyk found that visual learning through drawing images and diagrams significantly supported her understanding. She discovered that her drawings reinforced the spoken and written word which may often be misinterpreted, particularly for a student with specific learning requirements. This was reinforced when studying the swallowing disabilities over the lifespan subject in her third year of the undergraduate Honours degree program. She knew that having a solid foundational appreciation of the anatomy of the head and neck was extremely

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Speak Out | October 2021