The Relationship between Learning Styles, Learning Environments, and Student Success

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between Extension employees' learning styles and their performance in three different types of learning environments: traditional face-to-face instruction, minimally interactive online instruction, and highly interactive, multimedia-rich online instruction. Keith Golay's Learning Pattern Assessment and a ten-question post-test were used to gather data for this study. A 4 x 3 factorial ANOVA was used to test the data at the .10 level of significance. Results indicate that participants in the traditional face-to-face and the multimedia-rich, highly interactive online environment had statistically higher post-test scores than those participants in a minimally interactive online environment. Further, it was discovered that a participant's learning style had no statistically significant effect on their final post-test scores in any of the three instructional methods; and no significant interaction was found between the learning style and instructional method.