A Study on Academic Achievement in Relation to Learning Styles of Senior Secondary School Students

Abstract

A learner's capacity to acquire and process information in a learning environment is their "learning style". One of the essential applications of learning styles is that teachers may easily incorporate them into their instructional strategies. Students learn in various ways; amongst the rest, the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic (VAK) are the most prominent. This endeavour aims to identify secondary students' preferred sensory modalities for learning and analyse the association between academic achievement and learning style subscales. The study included 100 students selected using simple random sampling from Karnataka's class 8th and 9th grades secondary school students. Findings reveal that the predominant sensory modality of learning was aural and more prevalent than visual and kinaesthetic learning (34%). The relationship between learning style and academic success is statistically significant (p< 0.05). The main effects of the three variables - visual, auditory and kinaesthetic are also substantial on academic achievement. The female students were more dominant in the blend of all (Collaborative) learning styles.