Learners, learning styles and learning media

The paper is an account of an ongoing research project studying the links between learning style and learning media. The particular focus of the paper is on online learning. For centuries the lecture was the standard method of teaching in higher education, but the widespread introduction of ICT into Higher Education has led to dramatically increased educational benefits for learners. These benefits can be summarized as increased access to learning material and increased learner control of that material, and this, in turn, makes individual differences between learners an important factor in the learning process. A series of studies are reported using second year and third year psychology undergraduates, whose detailed examination marks were obtained in order to establish whether examination performance was a function of teaching method. Results were inconsistent, but there was evidence to suggest that lectures were the least effective teaching medium. When learning styles were measured using the Cognitive Style Index (Allinson and Hayes, 1991), some effects of learning style effects of learning style were apparent and a comparison between learning style and marks from lecture-based and online-based examination questions showed significant interactions between learning style and teaching medium – with web-based learning favouring the analytical learning style and summarized material favouring the intuitive learning style.