Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Dec 2011)
HOW TO BETTER MEET OUR STUDENTS' LEARNING STYLE THROUGH THE COURSE RESOURCES
Abstract
Publishers of the course resources for business higher education are willing to help professors and instructors to develop the learning process. An important part of the learning process is affected by the each student's learning style. Our paper focuses on how meeting students' learning styles can be done through the course resources we use. The scope of the paper is to identify a way to link students' learning preferences with the available course resources. The literature on this topic is limited, the interest in research being focused less on resources used and their useful diversity. We heavily relied in our research on the preliminary results of a market research study conducted by the Higher Education Group from Harvard Business Publishing among instructors who use resources from Harvard Business School's library. The research methodology is based on the case study method. We tried to recommend a treatment to our students and then analyze the effect of the applied treatment. The main instruments used are the VARK test followed by tailored recommendations for each student. The first conclusion of the research is that identifying the learning styles is extremely useful for students in terms of learning process. Knowing and exploiting their particular learning style helped students to maximize their learning. The second conclusion is that recommending resources based on learning styles is useful because it really helps students to learn in their own styles. The results of our paper show, firstly, that learning process could be facilitated by professors' directly identifying students' learning styles. Secondly, our findings underline the importance of having a diversity of resources available for our students, and to be able to offer them a constructive solution regarding their learning styles. Moreover, our contributions are reflected in the methodology we used in linking the learning styles with the course resources and in building our personal approach in issuing our students individual recommendations on study strategy based upon their learning styles.
