Learning Styles and Academic Performance of

Senior High School Students

Introduction
Student’s academic performance in school is
seemingly determined by his or her learning styles or
modes of learning. In the global setting, Felder and
Brent (2005) discovered that the poor test performance
of their student respondents is affected by their
learning styles which are, unfortunately, incompatible
with their teachers’ modes of teaching.
In the Philippines, Lapinig (August 2006) found
that the low satisfaction or poor academic performance
of students is not necessarily attributable to either
the difficulty or uninteresting topics of the subject or
the students’ lack of knowledge or ability. She
concluded that many underachieving students fall behind
because their learning styles are mismatched with the
approaches used by their teachers to teach them.
Learning styles refer to a range of theories that aim to
account for differences in individuals' learning. A
common concept is that individuals differ in how they
learn.
It is the way how different students learn. A style
of learning refers to an individual’s preferred way to
absorb, process, comprehend and retain information. The
four key learning styles are: visual, auditory, tactile
and kinesthetic. Visual learners prefer to use pictures,
graphs and images to organize and communicate their
thoughts and learn best from using flash cards. Auditory
learners prefer to listen, discuss, memorize and debate
in class. They learn best from audiobooks rather than
print ones. Tactile learners learn best by touch and
movement—they find opportunities to take part in
demonstrations, writing or building models. Kinesthetic
learners prefer to use their whole body in the learning
process—they use gestures to communicate ideas and learn
best in a hands-on environment.
It’s also describe as an individual’s method of
making sense of new material, commonly done through
sight, touch and sound. Taste and smell, although not as
frequently used as the last three, can still be
effective when aiming to solidify ideas in our brain.
How a person acquires and processes information. In
education, knowing the learning styles of students is
important because it allows to further the interaction
between teachers and students, it also allows more
personalized teaching.
“How students study and how they apply what they’ve
studied can greatly have an impact to their academic
performances in school.”

Framework

There are three selected theories that can support

this study. The first theory is Cognitivism Learning
Theory by Jean Piaget. It states that learning isn’t
just a passive assimilation of given knowledge. Instead,
he proposed that learning is a dynamic process
comprising successive stages of adaption to reality
during which learners actively construct knowledge by
creating and testing their own theories of the world
(Piaget, 1968). Piaget’s theory has two main strands:
first, an account of the mechanisms by which cognitive
development takes place; and second, an account of the
four main stages of cognitive development through which
children pass.
 The basic principle underlying Piaget’s theory is
the principle of equilibration: all cognitive
development (including both intellectual and affective
development) progresses towards increasingly complex and
stable levels of organization. Equilibration takes place
through a process of adaption; that is, assimilation of
new information to existing cognitive structures and the
accommodation of that information through the formation
of new cognitive structures. For example, learners who
already have the cognitive structures necessary to solve
percentage problems in mathematics will have some of the
structures necessary to solve time-rate-distance
problems, but they will need to modify their existing
structures to accommodate the newly acquired information
to solve the new type of problem. Thus, learners adapt
and develop by assimilating and accommodating new
information into existing cognitive structures.

Another theory is the Constructivism Learning

Theory by Jerome Bruner. A major theme in the
theoretical framework of Bruner is that learning is an
active process in which learners construct new ideas or
concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. The
learner selects and transforms information, constructs
hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive
structure to do so. Cognitive structure (i.e., schema,
mental models) provides meaning and organization to
experiences and allows the individual to “go beyond the
information given”.

As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor

should try and encourage students to discover principles
by themselves. The instructor and student should engage
in an active dialog (i.e., Socratic learning). The task
of the instructor is to translate information to be
learned into a format appropriate to the learner’s
current state of understanding. Curriculum should be
organized in a spiral manner so that the student
continually builds upon what they have already learned.

Bruner (1966) states that a theory of instruction

should address four major aspects: (1) predisposition
towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of
knowledge can be structured so that it can be most
readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most effective
sequences in which to present material, and (4) the
nature and pacing of rewards and punishments. Good
methods for structuring knowledge should result in
simplifying, generating new propositions, and increasing
the manipulation of information. Bruner’s constructivist
theory is a general framework for instruction based upon
the study of cognition. Much of the theory is linked to
child development research (especially Piaget). The
ideas outlined in Bruner (1960) originated from a
conference focused on science and math learning. Bruner
illustrated his theory in the context of mathematics and
social science programs for young children (see Bruner,
1973). The original development of the framework for
reasoning processes is described in Bruner, Goodnow &
Austin (1951). Bruner (1983) focuses on language
learning in young children.

The last theory is the Behaviorism Learning Theory

by J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. Behaviorism started as
a reaction against introspective psychology in the 19th
century, which relied heavily on first-person accounts.
J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner rejected introspective
methods as being subjective and unquantifiable. These
psychologists wanted to focus on observable,
quantifiable events and behaviors. They said that
science should take into account only observable
indicators. They helped bring psychology into higher
relevance by showing that it could be accurately
measured and understood, and it wasn’t just based off
opinions.

Watson and Skinner believed that if they were given a

group of infants, the way they were raised and the
environment they put them in would be the ultimate
determining factor for how they acted, not their parents
or their genetics.

Pavlov’s Dogs is a popular behaviorism experiment. A

group of dogs would hear a bell ring and then they would
be given food. After enough time, when the bell would
ring the dogs would salivate, expecting the food before
they even saw it. This is exactly what behaviorism
argues—that the things we experience and our environment
are the drivers of how we act.

The stimulus-response sequence is a key element of

understanding behaviorism. A stimulus is given, for
example a bell rings, and the response is what happens
next, a dog salivates or a pellet of food is given.
Behavioral learning theory argues that even complex
actions can be broken down into the stimulus-response.