The Analysis of Sports High School Students’ Learning Styles in Terms of Overall Academic Success

Abstract

Research findings about which learning style works better are not consistent. However, learning styles are known to be generally associated with learning and to support improvement in some learning outcomes. This study aims to determine learning styles of sports high school students and to examine these styles with respect to overall academic success. The study sample consists of 480 sports high school students (152 females, 328 males) who were the students of seven different sports high schools in Turkey. Kolb Learning Style Inventory-3 (LSI-3) was used as the data collection tool. Data was analyzed using χ² (Chi-Square) test and one-way analysis of variance. The study found out that the sports high school students mostly had diverging (39.5%) learning style, assimilating (21.5%) and converging (21.5%) were of equal rate, and accommodating (17.5%) was the least preferred learning style. The study indicated that students with high overall academic success had converging, accommodating, assimilating and diverging learning styles, respectively. Although most of the sports high school students had diverging learning style, the overall academic success of students with converging learning style was higher.