Student Teaching Changed Me: A Look at Kolb’sLearning Style Inventory Scores Before and After theStudent Teaching Experience

摘要

Student teaching as the culminating experience of a teacher preparation program has been shownto be of great importance in the preparation of pre-service agricultural educators (Harlin, Roberts,Mowen, Edgar, & Briers, 2007; Roberts, Mowen, Edgar, Harlin, & Briers, 2007; Kitchel & Torres,2006, 2007; Myers & Dyer, 2004). Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory (KLSI) is an instrumentdesigned to examine individual preference for learning in four learning modes: activeexperimentation (AE), reflective observation (RO), concrete experience (CE), and abstractconceptualization (AC). In addition, the KLSI examines learning preferences in the dimensions ofgrasping and transforming experience. This descriptive study examined the KLSI scores for twosemesters of student teachers (N = 37) from Texas A&M University at both the beginning and endof their student teaching experience. Student teachers were observed as falling into all ninelearning styles as indicated by Kolb and Kolb (2013) at both the beginning and end of the studentteaching experience. Results indicated that there was wide range of changes in individual studentteachers. Active experimentation was the learning mode showing the greatest amount of changeamong the population, and changes in the group were more apparent in the dimension oftransforming experience than in grasping experience.