Analyzing the VARK Model of Pre - Service Teachers PCK of Learning

Abstract

The style of learning refers to the way an individual gains and applies creativity to acquire skills or knowledge. Teachers are accountable for delivering high-quality instruction. As a result, teachers must be able to create an engaging learning environment that draws students' attention to the material being taught. This study will explore the advantages of the VARK (Visual, Aural, Reading or Writing, and Kinesthetic) paradigm as a very effective learning approach. The study's purpose was to investigate whether there is a significant correlation between learning preferences of first-year undergraduate pre-service teachers using the VARK model and their age and programme of study. The population of the participants is 219 students in the B. Ed programme in St. Teresa’s College of Education in Ghana. The purposive sampling was used to select participants for the study however, only 176 of them conveniently responded to the questionnaire. Of these 39 were Early Childhood Education (ECE) students, 116 Primary Education (PE) students and 21 Home Economics (HE) students. The VARK Questionnaire (Version 8.01) was adopted and used for data collection. Descriptively, it was noted that 22(12.5%) of the participants prefer Visual learning only, and 37(21.0%), 19(10.8%) prefer Aural, Reading/Writing and Kinesthetic learning only respectively. Meanwhile, some participants indicated that they prefer learning in more than one of the models, thus 30(25.6%) 13(7.4) and 10(5.7) prefer learning in Bimodal, Trimodal Quadrimodal respectively. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation was conducted to assess the underlying structure for the 16 items of the VARK learning model. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of the main effect of age and programme of study on the VARK learning model of the pre – service teachers were assed. It was found that there is statistically significance difference between the mean scores of the pre – service teachers in the age brackets of 18-23 and 24-29 years of the study (F1, 174 =.001, p < .05). There was a statistically significant difference between programmes of study as determined by one-way ANOVA (F (2,173) = 8.457, p = .001). A Tukey post hoc test revealed that using the VARK learning model there was statistically significantly difference between PE (3.09 ± 1.5, p = .001) and ECE pre – service teachers (4.15 ± 1.7, p = .001) but not PE and HE pre – service teachers (3.75 ± 1.05, p = .301) programmes of study. Again, there was no statistically significant difference between the ECE and HE programme of study (p = .646). It is therefore, recommended teachers should vary their lessons to meet the needs and learning styles of all learnings by the VARK instructional tools or resources. Keywords: VARK, Model, Pre-service teachers, Professional Content Knowledge, St. Teresa’s College of Education