Instructional Technology, Learning Styles, And Academic Achievement

Abstract

The paper presents results of an action research project, which took place between January and April 2001, and examined how differences in prior academic achievement of students and in their learning styles affected learning outcomes. All students received hypermedia instruction. The results show that hypermedia allowed previously lower-achieving students to improve their academic performance and therefore reduce the gap between them and their higher-achieving peers. The findings suggest that reducing the gap was a result of hypermedia instruction moderating differences in achievement between students with different learning modalities and accommodating a wider range of learning styles than conventional instruction. These findings were consistent with the previous 2000 study and with the 1999 pilot project, where students in the experimental group received hypermedia instruction, and their achievement was compared with the achievement of conventionally instructed students in the control group. Course website access patterns and a survey of student attitudes towards hypermedia instruction are also discussed. The findings support the use of learning styles as a guideline for incorporation of the hypermedia into the instructional design of the course. I.

A Contribution To Validation Of Score Meaning For Felder Soloman's Index Of Learning Styles

“…Each year approximately 30% of the course graduates left for an Industrial Internship year, and thus the pool of respondents for the second round of the ILS was always smaller, as seen in Table 1. In -2002, this turnover has not significantly affected the overlap between the students who wrote the ILS # 1 and the ILS # 2, because of the high rate of participation in the former. However in 2000, the first questionnaire combined the ILS with a version of the Kolb learning style assessment.…”

Reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom

“…In order to examine the effect of the Learning Support Service's blended intervention, we firstly used the group's semester one results as a baseline of performance (Wiezel, 1998;Kaufman et al, 2000;Zywno, 2002). Bearing in mind that the pre-intervention group average was 42%, the post-intervention scores of 56% indicate an overall improvement in semester two of 14%, within both the Continuous Assessments and exam results.…”

“…Beyond these qualitative measures, we felt it important to reflect upon the wider effectiveness of the program itself. To do this, we again adopted a quantitative methodology similar to Wiezel (1998), Kaufman et al (2000) and Zywno (2002), who suggests that previous results can be used as a benchmark or predictor of future academic performance.…”

The Impact Of Online Lecture Notes On Learning Outcomes

“…The results become less surprising when learning styles of engineering students are taken into account. A number of past studies [12][13] have shown that engineering students are visual rather than verbal learners, meaning they learn better from visual images rather than words they hear or read. In a multi-campus study involving over 2500 undergraduate engineering students, Felder and Brent 12 found that 82% of engineering students are visual learners and only 18% are verbal learners.…”