Learning Styles, Teaching Strategies and Academic Performance: Triangular Basis for a Faculty Development Program in Nursing Curriculum and Instruction

Abstract

In the field of nursing, numerous studies which investigate the learning styles of the nursing students have been published, however, not a vast number of studies have been accomplished to correlate the students’ learning styles to their academic performance or to the teaching strategies employed to them. This descriptive-correlational study aimed to ferret out any relationships between learning styles, teaching strategies, and academic performance as a triangular basis for a development program in nursing curriculum and instruction. The samples were a cohort of 363 nursing students, 18-26 years old, chosen by cluster sampling, and 37 teachers in Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand. The instruments were the Kolb's Learning Style Inventory Version 3.1 (KLSI 3.1) and a survey questionnaire of Nursing Teaching Strategies. It was found out that most of the students are Convergers based on David Kolb's classification of learning styles. Statistics proved that learning style is dependent on age having found that students within the same age bracket have mostly the same learning style (X2=33.102); gender dependent at X2=35.702 having found that most females are Convergers while most males are Accommodators; and that there is a significant difference in the learning style by year level at X2 =18.687. It was also found out that age, gender and year level are all related to academic performance. Neither learning style nor academic performance was found to have a direct relationship to teaching strategies, however, it was found out that learning style is related to academic performance.