A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LEARNING STYLES OF ADOLESCENTS FROM DIVERSE NATIONS BY AGE, GENDER, ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL, AND NATIONALITY
Andrea Honigsfeld, Ed.D. Molloy
College, USA.
Abstract: Previous research conducted in the United States and selected countries revealed
that students’ learning-style preferences were significantly discriminated by age,
achievement, gender, and cultural differences. This research further investigated the
learning-style characteristics of 1,637 adolescents from five countries—Bermuda,
Brunei, Hungary, Sweden, and New Zealand. It analyzed their similarities and
differences by age, gender, academic achievement, and nationality and it also explored the
interactive relationships among these four factors and adolescents’ learning-style
preferences. The English or appropriate foreign language (Hungarian, Malay, and Swedish)
versions of the Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 1996) for Grades
5-12 were used. For descriptive statistics, means and standard deviations were calculated.
For inferential statistics, univariate analyses of variance (ANOVAs), t tests, a multiple
analysis of variance (MANOVA), and Scheffe post-hoc tests were applied. A discriminant
analysis also was conducted for one subset of the data. The alpha level was established at
the p< .05 level.
Findings revealed that: (a) 16 of 22 learning-style elements (light, persistence, design,
responsibility, structure, learning alone versus with peers, authority-figure oriented,
learning in several ways, auditory, visual, and tactual perceptual strengths, intake, late
morning, afternoon, and being parent- and teacher-motivated) significantly discriminated
among 13-, 15-, and 17-year-old students; (b) 8 elements (motivation, persistence,
responsibility, learning alone versus with peers, learning in several ways, kinesthetic
perceptual strengths, and being parent- and/or teacher-motivated) differentiated between
males and females; (c) 15 of the 22 learning-style elements (light, temperature,
self-motivation, persistence, responsibility, learning alone versus with peers,
authority-figure oriented, learning in several ways, visual and tactual perceptual
strengths, evening versus morning, late morning, afternoon, and being parent- and
teacher-motivated) significantly discriminated among the gifted, high-/average- and
low-achieving students; (d) 21 learning-style variables (all except the auditory
perceptual preference) significantly distinguished among the student populations in the
five participating countries; and (e) five significant interactions were found for overall
learning-style preferences when country was one of the interactive factors:
age-by-country, gender-by-country, achievement-by-country, age-by-gender-by-country, and
age-by-achievement-by-country. These findings corroborated and supplemented previous
research by Dunn, Milgram and Price (1993), Ingham, Ponce Meza, & Price (1998), Lo
(1984), and Pengiran-Jadid (1998).