Examining the Effect of Teaching and Learning Styles on Student Achievement at the Elementary Level

النوع : Thèse

This research is a field investigating the relationship between the learning style preferences of students and the ones of their teachers as well as the effect these preferences are on students’ achievement and their liking of the course. The learning style model that was used is the Dunn and Dunn model. It is hypothesized that 1) there is a significant correlation between students’ learning styles and their achievement at school, 2) there is a significant correlation between students’ learning styles and their teachers’ teaching styles in terms of the students’ school achievement, 3) when students are exposed to their own learning style, they are more likely to succeed, 4) students are more likely to like the course when the instructional methods used match their own learning styles, and 5) students are likely to achieve better when they like the way a subject is given. In conducting this study, which is a quantitative kind of research that has a qualitative aspect, 556 students and 52 teachers from 3 different schools served as the subjects of this study. The students, who were in grades 4, 5 and 6, were asked to fill in a questionnaire of 104 questions to measure their learning styles preferences, and a parallel one was devised for the teachers. The results of these questionnaires were used to classify students and teachers in learning styles groups. Then the grades of the students were used to check if the matching profiles affected their grades. The methods of data analysis show how the students and teachers were distributed into six learning or teaching profiles in order to see if having the same profile with the teacher affects the grade of the student. Initial results of the study lead to the acceptance of the research hypotheses. But further investigations show different achievement in different subjects. In math and science, the results are very much in favor of the research hypotheses, whereas in first foreign language and Arabic, the results do not prove the validity of the hypotheses. Some implications in the field of education and recommendations for future research studies are presented.