LEARNING STYLES AND MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENTS AMONG HIGHER SECONDARY SCIENCE STUDENTS

This study was conducted to understand the learning style and its relationship to mathematics achievement among higher secondary students. Two hundred forty seven grade eleven science students from two higher secondary schools at Kathmandu, Nepal, participated in the study. In this survey method, a set of 44 force choice dichotomy items of the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) were used at the beginning and end of the academic year 2012/13. The ILS has four dimensions that include processing (active/reflective), perceive (sensing/intuitive), input (visual/verbal) and understanding (sequential/global). The learning outcome was based on 50 items MAT of 100 marks constructed by the researchers. It was administered at the end of the academic year along with ILS. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics which includes mean, standard deviation, and correlation. The findings revealed that majority of the students tend to mild learning styles among active, sensing, visual, sequential and global. The MAT score of the students varies from 38.92 to 48.50 and total mean scores 42.91 with std dev 13.52. However, students' scores, whose learning styles dimension changed from visual to verbal, were higher followed by sensing to intuitive, and lower from verbal to verbal. In addition, there exist relationships between pre and post learning styles with mathematics achievement.