Hi Clare - All went will with our 23 trainees today. Thanks, Tracey. Employability Skills Instructor, Finchale College, Durham

Finchale - a residential vocational training college for adults - has been using Your Preferences in its induction for its students since the very first pilot in 2004. They do great work for their students - and we’re delighted that they have chosen Your Preferences to be an integral part of their new trainee induction process. Read on for more information.

Participant: Finchale Training College, Durham
Dates: 2004, 2007
Contacts: Tracey Hughes, Kevin Loughlin (2004); Tracey Hughes (2007)

Introduction

Finchale is a national, specialist training college, providing vocational training. Its aim is to enable unemployed, disabled adults to gain the skills they need to enter and retain employment.All applications are assessed, prior to entry, for their relevance to gaining employment.

Finchale welcomed the chance to trial the Your Preferences tool in their approach to individuated personal development. They were ‘on board’ with the Your Preferences project from the very beginning of its lifetime, in 2004, and have been using Your Preferences technology ever since.

Initial Feedback (2004)

Source: Kevin Loughlin, ‘Learning Styles Electronic Assessment’, 29/11/2004

Tracey Hughes selected six members of staff and six students of mixed ability to use the tool. Every participant considered the resulting profile to provide ‘an accurate assessment of the individual’s approach to acquiring knowledge’ and to offer ‘precise information as to how we best learn and study’.

The author of the summary described his own profile as ‘incredibly accurate…an amazing piece of science’, an assessment backed up by his colleagues’ amazement at the report’s accuracy. He decided to experiment further in using the tool with two students from one of the college’s IT courses. Difficulties experienced in these students’ coursework were to some extent alleviated through use of Your Preferences profiles, in conjunction with Jason Miller, tutor to the students.

Following the trial, Tracey contacted Dr Clare Howard of e-coaches, with the aim of investigating research and development possibilities — the college remained in contact with e-coaches, leading to the opportunity for feedback on the Your Preferences project at later stages in the tool’s development.

Further Involvement (2004–present)

The Your Preferences tool and personal preferences reports have been used by Finchale ever since the initial trial, and has been built into their induction system for new students. They find it a really positive and personal way to help students engage with taking responsibility for their own learning, as discovering about personal learning preferences can be really motivating for individuals without much experience of education.

Tracey Hughes also intends to usie the tool when the students start CV building exercises, as ‘the reports highlight the positive and negative traits of their [individual] personalities; and, as we all know, employers do recruit on personality’.

However, we have identified – in consultation with Ms Hughes – that certain learners with specific special learning needs (in particular, Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder [SPLD] a condition that may or may not sit on the autistic spectrum – see http://www.spldinfo.com/what_is_spld.htm for more information) are having trouble understanding ‘what’s going on’ with the Your Preferences pictures. The next stage, then, is for e-coaches to engage in a research trial to identify just what these barriers might be.