Educational Data Mining and the Validity of the Index of Learning Styles

Dr Shobbrook's research uses Educational Data Mining in a mixed method to investigate the validity of the Felder-Silverman Model of learning styles, a model developed for engineering education. The results show that for a minority of students there was some alignment between the model's predictions for one of their learning style's dimensions; however, the majority of student resource selections and perceptions did not correlate with the predictions of the model. This research concludes that this learning styles model has insufficient predictive power to be accepted as a strategy for improving learning outcomes.