EXAMINING THE LATITUDINAL VARIATION OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ LEARNING STYLE PROFILES

Year 2016, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 45 - 58, 30.06.2016

Kağan Kırcaburun , Şahin Danişman

Abstract

The idea of learning styles being an important factor over the achievement of the students has recently gained popularity. However, the results of both domestic and foreign studies that have investigated the learning styles in terms of various variables are quite different from each other, yielding that there is no consistency in the literature. This descriptive study aims to determine the latitudinal variation of the learning styles of the pre-service teachers and examine the learning style profiles with regard to various variables. The data were collected from 366 undergraduate students who are enrolled at the Faculty of Education in a state university in western region of Black sea. In order to collect data, “Kolb Learning Style Inventory” and “Personal Information Form” have been used. Research data were analysed by using frequency, percentage, crosstabs and Chi-square test. In order to measure the magnitude of the effect that is found by chi-square test, Phi Cramer’s V test was applied. The findings revealed that 56.8% of pre-service teachers have dominant learning styles as diverger; 28.1% of them as assimilator; 11.5% of them as accomodator and 3.6% of them as converger. Moreover, it has been found that there is a weak but statistically significant relationship between pre-service teachers’ grade levels and learning styles. The study also indicated that the department, gender, parental schooling, field tendencies and daily study time have no significant effects on the learning style preferences of pre-service teachers. This study adds to the literature in that it questions consistency among the previous results of the studies. It may be suggested that new studies may be conducted using more variables to reveal different relationships and different data collection tools such as qualitative ones to shed light on these relationships. Furthermore, the practitioners may take into consideration the learning styles of the students, especially in different grade levels.

Keywords

Learning, learning styles, pre-service teachers, grade level

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