Effects of teaching mathematics to learning style perceptual preference on academic achievement of seventh-grade middle school students

Teaching methods that are effective with some students, fail with other students, because students perceive and process information differently. The personal preference by which one perceives and processes new material is called one's learning style. Using the Dunn and Dunn Learning Style Inventory assessment instrument, the learning style perceptual preference of 262 seventh grade students from a large, urban, middle school in southeast Florida were identified. This research investigated the effects of teaching mathematics to the preferred perceptual preference of these students in terms of academic achievement. Four teachers were trained in the Dunn and Dunn learning style teaching model to acquaint them with the experimental treatment used in this study. A pretest-posttest design was used to observe the mean gain in achievement scores on a 25-element assessment between students taught using a traditional teaching format and those taught in the learning style treatment approach. All students in the experimental group were first introduced to new mathematics material with a global story and taught in their primary learning style perceptual preference: (a) auditory, (b) tactile, (c) kinesthetic, or (d) visual. The material was reinforced through their secondary preference and a creative, student-constructed project was shared with the classmates. Several two-way factorial analyses of variance were used to study the treatment effect on the dependent variable. Neither the main effect for treatment nor the interactions between treatment and demographic variables (race, gender, learning styles) were significant at the.05 level. Within the context of this study, teaching through a student's perceptual learning style preference does not appear to be significantly more effective than teaching in a traditional manner.