Effects of traditional- versus learning-style instructional strategies on community-college students' achievement in and attitudes toward developmental reading and writing

This researcher was first to use Building Excellence's (BE) (Rundle & Dunn, 2000) learning-styles strategies on developmental reading and writing students at the community-college level. The 103 participants were enrollees in multiple sections of one remedial English course at a New York City public two-year college. Students were subdivided into experimental and control groups with the intervention sample (n=53) completing the BE online. Their BE Learning and Productivity Style (LPS) profiles were analyzed by the researcher, a Dunn and Dunn Certified Learning-Style Trainer. The treatments consisted of workshops in which participants were taught learning-style strategies and study-skills techniques. Researcher-created materials provided strategies to use when traditional teaching methods did not accommodate students' learning styles.;The research design compared the groups' pre- and posttest scores on the City University of New York (CUNY) American College Test (ACT) Reading Compass Test and CUNY/ACT Writing Sample (CUNY Office of Assessment, 2006). Participants' attitudes were assessed with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Adults (STAI) (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) administered as a pretest during the midterm examination period, with posttest responses collected before final examinations. Experimental group participants' reactions to doing homework through learning-style strategies were tallied with the Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) (Pizzo, 1981, 1982).;BE data results showed that over 80% of the experimental sample ( n=53) had learning styles at variance with traditional teaching through lectures and readings. The largest proportion were tactile-kinesthetic ( n=22) learners who preferred hands-on learning and active body movement, and auditory-verbal (n=21) students who synthesized ideas best through peer-group interactions.;Reading and writing results indicated significant achievement ( p ≤ .001) within both groups, with a very large effect size for reading (Partial Eta Squared value of .553). Pretest attitudinal differences between the groups were statistically significant (p < .01). By posttest, State-Anxiety had significantly increased but only in the control group (p < .001). An unanticipated finding was that levels of Trait-Anxiety in the experimental group were lower than at pretest. Results of this research have important implications for community-college students' academic success and persistence. Findings supported the efficacy of learning-style strategies for improving achievement and attitudes.