DOES AN INSTRUCTOR’S LEARNING STYLE INFLUENCE STUDENT PERFORMANCE? A PRELIMINARY STUDY

In order to assess the influence of an instructor’s own learning style on the performance of his students, both the instructor and the students were assessed using Kolb’s (1999) Learning Style Inventory. This inventory groups learners into four quadrants, according to combinations of four stages in the Learning Cycle: Active Experimentation (AE), Concrete Experience (CE), Reflective Observation (RO), and Abstract Conceptualization (AC). In this way, learners relying on the AE-CE combination are termed Accomodators (A), and, likewise, the other combinations, CE-RO, RO-AC, and AC-AE, result in the quadrants Diverger (D), Assimilator (S) and Converger (C) respectively.

Students with an attendance of 85% or higher from three Earth Science classes with the same instructor were included in this study.

The instructor’s assessment showed he relied heavily on one particular learning style, S. Students’ learning styles were distributed as follows (number of students by quadrant): A: 15, D: 17, S: 26, and C: 14. The mean performance for individual work completed (out of 100%) for each quadrant was: A: 60.90, D: 70.87, S: 73.14, and C: 63.56. The highest performing students placed in the same quadrant the instructor has (S). The lowest performing student group (A) represents those learners who rely on learning stages that the instructor does not use to learn himself: AE and CE.

This data also implies that RO might be the teaching strategy most relied upon by the instructor, since students in the D quadrant did almost as well as those in the instructor’s quadrant (S). Students in the other two quadrants, however, performed 10% lower.

In conclusion, this preliminary data shows that instructor awareness of his/her own learning style and the distribution of learning styles in the classroom could potentially enhance student performance by adapting the material presented in ways that are equally accessible to all learners.