Does a good match of trainees' learning styles to their tutors' instructional strategies contribute to trainees' academic achievements?

摘要

Over the last two decades Israel has experienced a rapid and extreme growth in diversity among students entering academia. In conjunction, the number of students with learning disabilities and learning difficulties has risen to twenty percent in a leading college. In earlier research, the match between students' learning styles (LS) and their teachers' instructional strategies (IS) and the correlation of this LS-IS match with students' academic achievements was studied. Nevertheless, there is no report of research where one-on-one education is implemented. Moreover, there are no references about the match of a trainees' LS to their tutors' IS and the correlation of this LS-IS match with the trainees' achievements as presented in the current paper. To measure the LS- IS match, two different methods were used. First, calculating the correlation between trainees' LS and tutors' IS (LS-IS correlation); second, calculating the LS-IS distance. Thirty-nine tutors were paired with 42 trainees with learning disabilities (three tutors had two trainees each) during the 2016 academic year. Thus, 42 pairs of tutors and trainees worked to help the trainees achieve better academic grades. The Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles (ILS) was used to measure the tutors' preferred IS and the trainees' preferred LS. In both methods, the LS-IS match was correlated with the trainees' grades. If the LS-IS match influences the trainees' achievements, significant positive correlations in the first method and significant negative correlation in the second method must appear. Nevertheless, the results show no significant correlation (positive or negative, accordingly) between the LS-IS match and students' achievements at the end of the first semester of 2016 and again at the end of the second semester of 2016.