Is There Any Match Between Students’learning Style, Strategies, And Lecturers’ Teaching Techniques ? A Case Study of Benin EFL Students at the University Level (Published)
Educational research has identified a number of factors for some of the differences in how students learn (Reid, 1987). One of these factors, learning styles, is of widespread interest in the education area. In fact, each of us has an individual learning style, which means that we learn and process information in different ways. Also, there has been a prominent shift within the field of learning strategies, and teaching techniques over the last twenty years. How students process new information and what kinds of strategies they employ to understand, learn or remember the information has been the primary concern of number of researchers. Furthermore, the way courses are delivered by lecturers, the teaching techniques used has a great impact on students’ achievement. The objective of this current study aims at establishing a comparison between two groups of students at the university level. (A Training College and a Public University) in order to determine their learning preference, strategies, and the teaching techniques that they would best select. The researcher collected data from a sample of approximately 225 students. From the data, there is a significant difference between the two types of students in terms of the appropriate teaching, techniques used by lecturers and their match with students’ learning style and strategies.
Keywords: Learning Style, Strategies., Students, Teaching Techniques
Educational Multimedia and Learning Style Preferences (Published)
Multimedia learning offers a significant opportunity to reach the greatest number of students and most effectively supports students with different learning styles. The basis for the use of multimedia is the assumption that when the user interacts within these media he/she learns more meaningfully. The fundamental principle behind multimedia learning is best described by Mayer (2005) “People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone”. This study seeks to provide a framework for multimedia-enhanced education. The multimedia in this study were PowerPoint and Multiple Mouse Mischief. The framework for the study was built on what high-end multimedia presentation currently facilitates: presenting course materials in; text, graphics, photographs and animation (visual), audio and discussion (aural), with follow-up point-and-click or drag-and-drop exercises (Kinaesthetic). The study set out to examine how learning styles interact with the presentation media to influence the learning outcomes of the students. The findings revealed no significant main effect of learning style on the students’ achievement scores. However, the kinaesthetic learners recorded the highest adjusted post-test mean achievement score. It was concluded that interactive multimedia presentation can facilitate diverse learning styles and although there are claims about the benefits of multimedia presentations but the reality is that the instructional technologies are only tools and should be applied with careful regard to the complex nature of human information processing.
Keywords: Learning Style, Multimedia, Multiple Mouse, Powerpoint