Abstract
Although learning styles are considered as an important factor in education, students often have to learn in courses that do not support their learning styles. A challenge for technology facilitated learning is therefore to assist and help students to cope with courses that do not match their learning styles by training and developing their less preferred skills. In this paper, the interactions between students’ learning styles, their behaviour, and their performance in an online course that is mismatched regarding their learning styles were analysed. The results show which learners need more help in mastering mismatched courses, help in getting a better understanding about how students with good performance record and poor performance record learn with respect to their learning styles, and provide information about how to identify learners who might have difficulties in learning based on their behaviour.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of iCORE, Xerox and the research related gift funding provided to the Learning Communities Project by Mr. Allan Markin. The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan, for financially supporting this research under Contract No. NSC 96-2520-S-008-007-MY2, NSC 097-2811-S-008-001-, and NSC 97-2631-S-008-003-.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IADIS International Conference of Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (Graf et al. 2008b).
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Kinshuk, Liu, TC. & Graf, S. Coping with mismatched courses: students’ behaviour and performance in courses mismatched to their learning styles. Education Tech Research Dev 57, 739–752 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-009-9116-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-009-9116-y