Gaining Insight into Business Telecommunications Students Through the Assessment of Learning Styles

Abstract

The assessment of student learning styles can be of significant value for developing and evaluating an appropriate mix of pedagogical techniques and activities. With this in mind, learning style preferences were collected from over 300 undergraduate business telecommunications students. These set of data show that a breadth of learning style profiles are exhibited by undergraduate business telecommunications students. Most importantly, this article demonstrates a process to evaluate whether or not the current course structure either favors or disadvantages any particular learning style profile. Because there are many learning style profiles present, the evidence that no single profile is disadvantaged gives the instructor confidence in the mix of pedagogical techniques and activities that are employed in this particular course. Subject Areas: Felder-Solomon ILS, Learning Style Models, and Pedagogy.

A Preliminary Investigation into the Adaptive Learning Styles of Business Students

“…Rationale to use the ILS follows (see Parvez & Blank, ; Sandman, ): It is a very common tool for learning styles assessment, and has been used extensively. It has been validated. The number of dimensions is constrained, improving feasibility of implementation. It provides an effective way of assessing the various ways students learn. It is clear and easily scored. It provides a convenient and practical approach for assessing learning style preferences. It is readily available and is in the public domain (see http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html). …”

“…Table 1 provides several examples of studies where the ILS has been used in efforts to understand the learning styles of different majors. There are many other studies that focus more on the learning styles of students in particular courses (e.g., Chamillard & Karolick, 1999;Howard, Carver, & Lane, 1996;Sandman, 2009;Zualkernan, 2007).…”

“…Sandman argues that the quest is to understand the nature of learning styles in order to be a more effective instructor, and to provide a process for evaluating course design in response to the portfolio of preferred learning styles found in the course (Sandman, ). This is supported by Hawk and Shaw, who assert that faculty who are consciously aware of their student's learning styles are able to make more informed pedagogical choices to support learning in their courses, and that the subsequent alignment of matching learning activities should result in higher levels of academic performance (Hawk & Shah, ).…”

“…Ideally, an appropriate set of pedagogical techniques and activities is chosen based on the types of learning styles typically present in one's courses. There are many different instruments that have been developed to assess students’ learning styles (see Eom et al., ; Felder & Henriques, ; Sandman, ). For the purposes of this study, the Felder‐Soloman Inventory of Learning Styles (hereafter, ILS) learning style assessment tool was used.…”

Web-based Tutorials and Traditional Face-to-Face Lectures: A Comparative Analysis of Student Performance

“…Proponents of innovative mediated and multimedia learning assert that Web-based tutorials offer opportunities to increase student engagement and understanding of material (Cheng and Swanson, 2011;Cheng, 2010;Sandman, 2009) and that the use of such frameworks "cultivates an active and multi-sensory learning environment to better address student auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning styles" (Chen and Swanson, 2011, p. 16). …”