Do Business Students’ Culturally Anchored Values Shape Student-Driven or Teacher-Driven Learning Style Preferences?

Abstract

University education is part of a globally competitive service industry and contributes more to Australia’s export earnings than agriculture. This article argues that a deeper understanding of diverse cultural student groups is important for Australian and other universities that wish to differentiate their education service offerings by customizing them to different segments. International and domestic students are commonly seen to have different learning style preferences. This study empirically explores whether an understanding of culturally anchored values provides a better customer segmentation measure to predict learning style preferences than existing domestic and international student measures. Three questions are empirically addressed: Do business students’ culturally anchored values explain variation in learning style preferences? Do students’ culturally anchored values predict a preference for a more student- or teacher-driven learning environment? and Can an understanding of culturally anchored values provide a better customer segmentation variable to identify learning style preferences than the more commonly used categories of domestic and international? This study found that culturally anchored values provided stronger predictors of learning style preferences than domestic and international student categorizations. Implications for marketing undergraduate business programs are identified.