An Examination of the Relationship between Instructional Strategies to Learning Styles Distance and Students' Achievements

Some researchers claim that a close match between a student's learning style (LS) and the teacher's instructional strategies (IS) supports students' achievements. Accordingly, in order to maximize student achievements, teachers should adjust their teaching strategies to fit their students' learning styles. The current paper deals with a true field experiment aimed at examining the relationships between the distance of teachers' IS to students' LS and students' learning achievements. An IS-LS distance for each student and his or her teacher was measured, and its correlation to this student's achievements was calculated. The Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles (ILS) was used to measure students' preferred LS as well as teachers' preferred IS and a method for measuring the IS-LS distance was developed. The research population, comprising 165 students and 8 teachers from one high school and two colleges, completed the ILS questionnaire. The absolute value of the difference between the student's LS to teacher's IS defined the IS-LS distance; the distances were calculated for each student and the relevant teacher. If the argument that a good IS-LS match contributes to a student's achievement is valid, then a significant negative correlation between the IS-LS distance and the student's achievements must appear. The correlations between the IS and LS distances and students' achievements in 17 courses were calculated in order to answer the above question. The research findings do not support the assumption that matching IS to LS improves student achievements.