COMPARING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ PREFERRED LEARNING STYLES BEFORE AND AFTER THE 2020-2021 ONLINE SCHOOL YEAR

Many universities conducted classes fully or near-fully online for the 2020-2021 academic year during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, typical classroom and laboratory content delivery was suspended and replaced with recorded lectures, Zoom, YouTube videos, and other digital media. We surveyed 126 university students enrolled in an introductory geoscience course in the Fall of 2019 and 100 students in the Fall of 2021 using the VARK Questionnaire. The VARK assesses four categories of learning styles: Visual, Aural/Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic based on self-reported survey questions. Visual refers to the preferred use of graphs, diagrams, flowcharts, etc. Aural/Auditory refers to learning through hearing spoken word, such as lectures, podcasts, etc. Read/Write refers to information that is read or written down, such as PowerPoints, textbooks, blogs, etc. Kinesthetic refers to learning via experience and practice, such as demonstrations, experiments, and applied or “real-world” scenarios. The two categories that showed a measurable change pre- and post-online school year were Visual and Kinesthetic, while the other two remained fairly static. In Fall 2019, 20.9% of students’ responses showed a Visual preference, while in Fall 2021 the number fell to 18.7%. In the Fall 2019, 42.2% of responses showed a Kinesthetic preference, which increased to 44.1% in 2021. Both the Fall 2019 and 2021 surveys showed that approximately 70% of students identify Kinesthetic as their preferred learning style. Between the 2019 and 2021, the number of students whose primary style was Visual dropped from 9.6% to 4.6%. Possible explanations for these changes in learning styles may be rooted in a full year of online classes. A stronger preference for Kinesthetic learning in 2021 may be due to a year of being unable to do hands-on, real-world applications in person. The decrease in Visual learning preference may be due difficulties in explaining and understanding graphical data in an online environment. Surprisingly, despite the “online fatigue” felt by many in academia during the 2020-2021 school year, neither Aural/Auditory nor Read/Write preferences changed. Perhaps this is merely due to the nature in which many students consume other forms of information online both pre- and post-pandemic.