Students’ Perceptual Learning Style Preferences, Their Achievement, and Teachers’ Teaching Styles (With Particular Reference to Tana Beles Girls’ Boarding School, Pawe Woreda)

Abiy Gigzaw

doi:10.7176/jep/11-10-05

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the dominant students’ learning styles preferences, their achievement, and teachers’ teaching style preferences in Tana Beles Girls’ Boarding School. Comparison was made between (i) students’ perceptual learning style preferences’ and their achievement. (ii) students’ learning style preferences with respect to their teachers’ teaching style preferences. The teaching styles and learning styles mentioned are based upon Reid (1987) consisting of visual, auditory, tactile, group, and individual. This study is a survey method using 4-point Likert Scale questionnaire as the instrument. The obtained Cronbach alpha coefficients were 0.78 and 0.75 for teachers’ and students’ questionnaires respectively. Comprehensive sample technique was employed in the study. The data were analyzed using SPSS. Mean, standard deviation, ANOVA, Chi-square were used to detect the significances of the data. The result indicated that both students’ learning styles and teacher’s teaching styles did not match. The majority of students are group learners but the teachers preferred tactile teaching style.. Based on the findings, there were also the relationship between students’ learning style preferences and their academic performances. This indicated that teaching styles can make students to promote their own learning success, which include a vast number of teaching techniques so as to make learning easier, fast, more enjoyable, effective, and to increase the performance. In the finding, students whose learning style was tactile scored good result since the teachers also preferred tactile teaching style. In all academic classrooms, no matter what the subject is, there are students with multiple learning styles. Everyday teachers thus should make instructional decisions before, during, and after meeting the students and these decisions should lead the teachers to adapted learning/teaching styles to accommodate all students in the classroom. Keywords: learning styles, teaching styles, achievement DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-10-05 Publication date: April 30 th 2020

Highlights

Many people recognize each person prefers different learning styles and techniques
As it was indicated in the above table 1, students showed different preferences to learning styles
The result from table 1 demonstrated that the standard deviation of students’ preferences on visual, auditory, and tactile learning styles seemed almost similar whereas the standard deviation of group and individual learning styles seemed greater than others

Summary

Introduction

Many people recognize each person prefers different learning styles and techniques. Some students may find that they have a dominant style of learning, with far less use of the other styles. The questionnaire assesses preferred learning styles of the students based on how they learn best using visual, auditory, tactile, individual, and group. ANOVA was used to see the existences of the significance differences among the means of the learning and teaching styles: visual, auditory, tactile, group, and individual.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion