by Abigail Marshall, DDAI Information Services Director
©DDAI. Reprinted with permission

Q8. What is part-to-whole learning?

A: If you like to follow a set of instructions that someone else has written, you are probably a part-to-whole learner. If you need to know what the end product is going to be, and you need to know where each part or piece fits before you are comfortable with it, then you probably are a whole-to-part learner.

In reading, the part-to-whole or linear-sequential learner is very comfortable with phonetic decoding where first you learn sounds of letters, then you piece the letters together to make the words.

Dyslexics can't learn by segmenting words into pieces. They need to have the context and the whole picture in mind. They are frustrated and lost with phonetic decoding because they need to have meaning FIRST, and then employ what they know about language and words to fill in the gaps.

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