At the beginning of the quarter I'm always looking for resources to pass on to students and ways to collect info from them to get to know them and make the course specific to that group of students. It seems one of the most discussed ways to do this is to give students a learning styles inventory. There are lots of different kinds out there. Here are a few I found that I like.

Visual, Auditory, or Tactile? from educationplanner.org which holds lots of great info for students thinking about college.

What's Your Learning Style? Multiple Intelligences-based questionnaire from edutopia.org. My results from today are in the image above with the header "Learning Style Results". When you get the results you can click on each of the intelligences to see a description and suggested study strategies.

I like to do these with students, but I also am careful to make a point that these are not perfect scientific instruments, but rather guides to help suggest ides that may be a good place to start. Some of the questions make it really difficult to choose just one answer. Students should take time to reflect a bit on themselves, but be careful not to waste time agonizing over an answer to submit. I also like to have a short discussion with students about their results. It's interesting to see not only what their results are, but also whether or not each student agrees with their results. Lastly, students should reflect on the study strategies suggested for each learning style or multiple intelligence. Those should be the big take-away from the exercise.