Volume Two - Academic Conferences

An Integrated Environment for Providing Learning Style
Information in a Unified Manner
Fatemeh Orooji, Fattaneh Taghiyareh and Zahra Rahimi
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tehran University,
Tehran, Iran
f.orooji@ut.ac.ir
ftaghiyar@ut.ac.ir
z.rahimi@ut.ac.ir
Abstract: Learning styles inventories provide insights into student perceptions about how they prefer to learn.
Since learning styles have notoriously some inconsistencies and invalidities, it is unreliable to base instructional
decisions on just one learning style preferences. This paper introduces a new approach to integrate various
learning style modelers in a unified system. The unified system contains some predefined phases in modeling
each style’s dimensions and some representing suggestions in order to visualize modeler results. Four popular
learning styles along with their specific dimensions and report representations have been studied to demonstrate
how to synthesize various inventories into a single representation of learners’ learning styles. Utilizing integrated
environment in the University of Tehran, department of electrical and computer engineering, has revealed some
dependencies between a modeler dimensions as well as some correlation between two modelers' dimensions.
The implication of this effort is to provide advice about how web-based instructions can be modified to
accommodate learners’ differences.
Keywords: user model, learning style, learning style questionnaire, web-based educational system, eLearning
1. Introduction
In the past decades, the rapid growth of the internet has brought a great deal of changes in our
educational environment, demanding continuous access to education. These web-based educational
systems need to consider different characteristics of a large number of students, constructing their
user models. User model represents essential information about each user in two dimensions: first,
viewing him as an individual considering the user’s knowledge, interests, goals, background, and
individual traits; second, modeling his/her context of work which consists of location, time of day and
platform. Individual traits are stable and usually determined using psychological tests, consist of
personality traits, cognitive styles, cognitive factors and learning styles (Brusilovsky and Millán, 2007).
Learning style (LS) shows how people learn and how they prefer to organize and represent
information. People have different strategies in managing information and different ways of
implementing these strategies. Considering the LS of each learner individually, provides facilities to
adapt the content (form, structure, presentation order of learning activities and choices of these
activities) to improve the learning results, which is impossible for a teacher in a traditional educating
system with a group of learners (Reed et al., 2000). There are several studies on some pedagogically
personalized learning contents based on learners’ LSs, indicating differences in performance between
matched and non-matched learners (Siadaty and Taghiyareh, 2007). However, there are still some
questions about the consistency of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic preferences and the value of
matching teaching and LSs (Coffield et al., 2004).
A considerable amount of research has been carried out to clear what is the best method to capture
learners’ LS. LSs can be detected through learner’s profile as well as his behaviors, for example his
navigation behaviour in web-based educational system (Bousbia et al., 2010). In addition, using a
questionnaire is another acceptable approach to detect user LS. Naturally almost all of known models
have proposed their own questionnaire independently (Felder and Silverman, 1988) (Grasha and
Riechmann, 1975) (Briggs Myers, 1962). It is noticeable that there are more than 70 definitions of the
LS concept and many researchers have tried to evaluate them showing the relationships between the
LS identified by the instrument and students' actual learning. It has been claimed that since “a reliable
and valid measure of learning styles has not yet been developed, it will be more useful to focus on
learners’ previous experiences and motivation” (Coffield et al., 2004).
This research aimed to be beyond any individual LS by gathering different LS models together and
unifying their information via a proposed approach. This unified modeling system provides a complete
report of learners’ LSs in adoption to integrated modelers, which may bring about better self-
609