The Diversity of Learning Styles and Academic Performance of Biology Students

Abstract

Learning style has its insightful impact on the particular dimensions of teaching and learning process. Students have their own preferred way to recognize, retain and retrieve information to perform well in academic performance. The purpose of this study is to determine the students’ preference learning styles and the correlation between students’ academic performance among biology students in one of public universities in Malaysia. A descriptive research design was employed using survey method to analyse the students’ preference learning styles and their academic performance. The Perceptual Learning Style Preferences Questionnaire (PLSPQ) developed by Joy Reid (1984) was adopted in this study and distributed to 130 biology students. Data gathered from PLSPQ identified students’ learning styles and preferences based on six domains: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, tactile, group and individual. The findings showed most biology students were strong Visual learner and acquired commendable CGPA ranging from 3.00 to 3.49. However, the present study revealed a weak, negative and very significant correlation between academic performance and kinaesthetic (r= 0.304), visual (r= 0.260) and individual (r= 0.189) due to a weak relationship between both variables. Interestingly, gender difference were found in kinesthetic learning style only. Also, there was a statistically significant difference in Auditory learning style between students who enrolled in minor Chemistry and Mathematics. It is concluded that it was important for the lecturers to cater for the different needs of students’ learning styles for science learning to be more interesting and give positive impact to their academic performance. For the future study, a large scale studies are recommended to further investigation on the relationship between learners’ learning styles and lecturers’ teaching style.