Learning Styles/Teaching Styles

Guinta (1984) investigated whether:

1. the 12 English, 10 Mathematics, 11 Science, and 10 other randomly selected teachers in an urban, co-educational, New York City, parochial secondary school taught in essentially similar ways or whether their instructional strategies tended to differ;
2. those instructors’ teaching styles were congruent with their own learning styles;
3. any relationship existed between matched student and teacher pairs and academic achievement; and
4. mismatches between students’ and teachers’ styles contributed to teacher stress.

Instructors’ learning styles were identified with the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 1981); the 11th and 12th-grade students’ styles were revealed through the Learning Style Inventory (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 1978). Instructors’ teaching styles were obtained on a self-report questionnaire. Learner/instructor congruence was based on measured degree of match with respect to 21 learning style variables. Instructors’ perceptions of students as stressors were measured through a semantic differential. A one-way analysis of variance, the pearson correlation, and a stepwise multiple regression procedure were used.

The data revealed that those secondary teachers’ instructional styles were essentially similar across different subjects. In addition, teachers did not teach the way they learned with two exceptions:

1. when teachers needed quiet while learning, they imposed a quiet environment on their students; and
2. when they were authority-oriented they tended to be authorative.

Unlike the Cafferty (1980) study, this research evidenced no relationship between matched teacher/student styles and academic achievement. When teachers’ and students’ styles were mismatched however, significant teacher stress was evidenced on both motor behavioral indicators and negatively toned affect.

Wallace (1995) assessed how closely students’ learning style preferences matched those of their teachers. A total of 450 sixth-and seventh-graders completed the Learning Style Inventory, and 128 teachers completed the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey, the adult version of the Learning Style Inventory. While the auditory modality was the teachers’ most preferred learning style, students preferred the visual modality.