Academic Advisors' Learning Styles: Establishing a Baseline and Examining Implications

Abstract

The influence of students' learning styles has been increasingly recognized as an integral component of effective higher education; therefore, application of learning styles to academic advising is equally relevant. As academic advisors address student learning styles in the hope of promoting greater student success, the contribution of advisors' own learning styles has received little attention. In addition to establishing a critical baseline, analyzing the learning style profiles of 30 academic advisors reveals that, although composite advisor learning style scores show substantial congruence with an a priori model, the disparity between any two individual advisor's contrasting styles was as much as 90%, leaving only a 10% learning style compatibility on which to base the advising process. Relative Emphasis: research, practice, theory