Learning Styles, Hidden Secrets

Learning style questionnaires, if we are not careful, can be little more than a technicality, especially in my area. After all, how many ways can you teach someone to draw? Explaining how only goes so far, this is not English comprehension, you have to get the students to see it, and do it.

Typically we have students for art that have high visual and high kineasthetic prefference, and this makes sense given what art & design entails. Typically they have a lower relative auditory preference. Something like this:



This is what we expect for art. However we have 2 students with the reverse.



When they clearly have a preference for auditory learning, and they are less strong on a visual or kineasthetic approach, why choose Art? I might expect this profile from an English Literature student or something.

A quick peep at their Literacy diagnostic showed them both to still have strong L2 literacy skills, with one of them exhibiting some L3 literacy skills. So, I ask again, why Art?

I believe the answer is that they both have a disability which makes learning via their preferred method difficult. One is Dyslexic and the other Dysgraphic (writing is an issue).

Basically, they don't have as strong a natural leaning to learning art the way art learning works (visually, and by doing), so it seems they picked art because their disability means they are prevented from learning other subjects that better match their natural learning style.

These learners will need particular help (lots more describing than is normal for an art student) since in some ways it appears that they are choosing to go against their own nature by doing art. (That's my view, but I welcome your comments.)

I wonder how much support this lends to my theory that some students choose art, not because they are great at it, but because they simply found other subjects even more difficult (on account of Dyslexia for instance). What do you think?