Given the median age of today's workforce and the aging of the workforce, it was appropriate to examine learning styles of adults. This knowledge is necessary for facilitators of adult educational programs to provide adults a learning environment that can provide maximum opportunity for adults to learn. The research problem, that learning styles do not change as people age, was addressed. People will resort to different styles when situations necessitate they do so to learn a particular item. The data revealed that environmental factors have different effects on people's learning styles. Implications of this study are far reaching into many areas of research. An implication is in the area of child psychology, as to &quotwhen are learning styles acquired?" This research has implications of holistic education theory of the individual learners and with added factors that may be influencers of history and conditions. The complexity of learning styles is influenced by background experiences of learning, as opposed to the basic cognition acquisition generally utilized. There are undisputed facts that: no thing succeeds llke success, and nothing improves the likeliliood of repeated actions llke a value added or a &quotgood" feeling about an experience. Learners will try to replicate situations they find to be successful as much as possible. The things learners can control are: selecting the course as close to the time they like for study purposes, day of week, length, etc., and choosing an instructor, which may be influenced by gender, nationality etc. Also, the style of the class format influences their choices. Learners may not understand the mechanics of &quotMatching Their Learning Style to the Teaching Style", but 'they do understand their llkes and preferences. Learners will not understand all they are attempting to accomplish in their search for achieving this match, but professional educators must recognize these influences and assist the learners by helping match the style of instructional techniques with the learning style of the adult learner to maximize the learning experience.

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The purpose of this study was to analyze the Mississippi Curriculum Test (MCT) reading scores of a cohort of eighth grade students in an east central Mississippi school to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in the MCT reading scale scores between students taught by their learning style and those taught by a basal approach. Research in learning styles has demonstrated that the process of assessing and matching students’ learning styles with activities or styles of the teacher results in significant increases on standardized tests of reading achievement. Students who prefer a conventional setting (difficult classes in the morning, working alone, bright lights, formal desks, etc.) are in the minority. The research design used was causal-comparative because groups were already intact and the research was to explore existing differences in groups of students. The Learning Styles group outperformed the Basal group at every grade level. The Learning Styles group had a lower percentage of students scoring in the Minimal and Basic proficiency levels in every grade than the state average. The percentage of students scoring in the Proficient and Advanced proficiency levels for the Learning Styles group was higher in every grade than the state average.

MA / Department of Educational Management / See the attached abstract below

Individual differences among humans are apparent in many environments and situations. Educators should be concerned about whether such differences are systematic to such an extent that they significantly affect the effectiveness of various pedagogical methods and training approaches. This paper investigates one type of individual difference - learning style - which may vary across cultures and which may be relevant for both accounting education and audit practice. Learning style is defined as an individual orientation to learning, utilizing four basic modes of learning to various degrees. Learning style measures were obtained from Norwegian and United States accounting students with varying experience levels. The learning styles for the US students were compared to data obtained in prior research and were found to be generally consistent with these studies. The Norwegian sample was compared to both the current United States results and prior research and was found to be significantly different from the US learning style preferences. Implications of these differences for both education and practice are explored.

This study examined the influence of selected student variables (learning style , age, sex, nationality (birthplace), academic achievement, and social class) on the ranking of twelve teacher characteristics. 246 ACT TAFE Associate Diploma in Business students formed the sample. Results were compared with a similar study by Travis (1987) of secondary students in Canada and USA. The extent to which different groups of students prefer different teacher characteristics has important implications for the growing practice of student rating of teachers' effectiveness. This practice (operating under a psychometric paradigm) currently assumes that any differences of opinion between student raters are the result of student carelessness (random error) or bias (systematic error). The possibility that these differences of opinion are the result of systematic variation, based on differences between students, is not countenanced. This study demonstrated significant (p=<0.05) systematic variations on four of the six variables studied (age, academic achievement, nationality and social class) in the way that respondents ranked one or more of the teacher characteristics. Comparisons with Travis's results showed marked differences both in the overall ranking of the twelve teacher characteristics and in the influence of student variables on the ranking of individual teacher characteristics. While Travis also showed that some student variables influenced the ranking of teacher characteristics, different relationships are evident. Travis's respondents emphasised the importance of good, supportive relationships with their teachers, while in this study, instrumental characteristics were preferred. This suggests a range of preferred characteristics across student populations. Within both studies there is a wide range of opinion as to the importance of all twelve teacher characteristics. More than half of the present sample also suggested a range of additional characteristics which they believed influenced their learning. These findings support the view that different students prefer different teachers. They suggest that some student variables may have a greater influence than others (e.g. academic achievement level) and that there may similarly be more agreement on some teacher characteristics (e.g. Knowledgeablity) than others. Users of student ratings of teacher effectiveness should be aware of the paradigmatic limitations of aggregated student scores. Validity might be improved by using teacher characteristics which raters agree are important and by grouping raters for influential student variables.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of learning styles and cooperative learning on academic achievement of technical university students in calculus. Meanwhile, in order to understand the effectiveness of learning on calculus, we perform item analysis of calculus test conducted in terms of item difficulty and item discrimination analysis. This research is conducted on a quasi-experimental design. Participants in this study are selected from the first year students of two departments in a technical university. Two intact classes of the same department are randomly assigned to be an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group receives the cooperative learning while the other receives the traditional learning. The results show that the learning achievement of active learners is better than reflective learners in the experimental group of information management. On the contrary, the reflective learners have better learning achievement than active learners in the experimental group of computer science and information engineering. The learning achievement of the experimental group is better than the control group in department of information management. The result is opposite in department of computer science and information engineering. But the differences of the learning achievement mentioned above are not statistically significant. Furthermore, item difficulty analysis suggests teachers and students should pay more attentions to those more difficult items and the corresponding calculus sections.

The purpose of this study was to identify the learning styles of Malaysian managers and executives and specifically to determine whether the alignment training methods with trainees' learning styles can improve the effectiveness of learning in Employee Development programmes. A comprehensive literature review was done and a sample survey approach was adopted. Past studies in the research area were summarized and hypotheses were made for empirical testing.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the learning styles of supplemental instruction leaders at a large, public university during the fall 2010 semester and determine whether or not their personal learning styles influenced the way they designed and developed out-of-class study sessions. The total population of supplemental instruction leaders was 37, of which 24 were eligible to participate in the study. Of the 24 eligible supplemental instruction leaders, 20 completed the entire study. Participants in the study included nine male and 11 female supplemental instruction leaders with a median age of 22.25 years-old. Seventeen participants indicated their classification as senior, two as junior, and one as sophomore. Of the participants, 16 indicated white as a race or ethnicity, one indicated Asian, two indicated African American, and one indicated both American Indian/Alaska Native and white. Supplemental instruction leader learning style was assessed using the Kolb Learning Style Inventory. Leaders were then interviewed, and their study sessions were analyzed. Through triangulation of data from learning style, interviews and actual study session documents, four major themes emerged. The four themes were: 1) incorporation of personal experience into study session design, 2) the sense of impact on student learning, 3) a feeling of the need to incorporate varied activities into study session design, and 4) the concept that students must take ownership over their own learning. No consistent pattern emerged among the themes; however, the results attributed out-of-class study session design to both the incorporation of personal learning style preferences as identified through the Kolb Learning Style Inventory and training conducted by the institution. Implications for future research include the need for continued research addressing how and if supplemental instruction leader learning style influences out-of-class study session design. Also, as institutions of higher education seek to expand academic support services to all students, future research should explore supplemental instruction leader training and the impact such training has on students seeking support from the supplemental instruction program.

It is hoped that the scientific reasoning skills taught in our biology courses will carry over to be applied in novel settings: to new concepts, future courses, other disciplines, and non-academic pursuits. This is the educational concept of transfer. Efforts over many years in the Cell Biology course at BYU to design effective assessment questions that measure competence in both deep understanding of conceptual principles and the ability to draw valid conclusions from experimental data have had at least one disquieting result. The transfer performance of many otherwise capable students is not very satisfactory. In order to explain this unsatisfactory performance, we assumed that the prompts for our transfer problems might be at fault. Consequently, we experimented with multiple versions that differed in wording or the biological setting in which the concept was placed. Performance on the various versions did not change significantly. We are led to investigate two potential underlying causes for this problem. First, like any other important scholastic trait, the ability to transfer requires directed practice through multiple iterations, a feature absent from most courses. Second, perhaps there is something innate about an individual's learning style that is contrary to performing well at transfer tasks. Students sometimes see exams as tests of gamesmanship; "Teachers are trying to outsmart me with trick questions." Post-exam conversations can be very litigious: "But it's not clear what you wanted!" We recommend the pedagogical use of transfer problems which place on the learner the responsibility to define the appropriate scope for inquiry and improve one's ability to acquire the kind of precise and comprehensive understanding that makes transfer possible. In this study, we analyze the effects of directed practice and learning style on transfer abilities. Implications for teaching are discussed and include promoting meta-cognitive practices, carefully selecting lecture and textual materials to reduce the "spotlighting effect" (selective focus on only a subset of ideas), and encouraging students to consciously use multiple learning strategies to help them succeed on various tasks. It is important to note that these skills are likely to take a significant amount of time for both students and teachers to master.