Understanding Relationships among Learning Styles, Learning Activities and Academic Performance: From a Computer Programming Course Perspective

Abstract

Investigating factors that influence the learning process of students is important, especially in online education. It can help course instructors to design the learning environment that really fits the course requirements and students and to enhance the learning performance. This study focuses on identifying different learning styles and finding the relationships among learning styles, learning activities and performance of computer science students in a Java programming course. According to the results, students with balanced preference on receiving information obtained highest scores although most of them are visual learners in this aspect. It indicates that adding more visual presentations in teaching process will be helpful to enhance learning performance. As it is one of the very first programming courses, most students prefer to follow the instructors' steps in solving the problems and obviously they joined the class more regularly than others. Therefore, concrete examples that involve well-defined procedures, facts, data, and experimentation are essential to teaching programming language. Moreover, the results confirmed that the number of assignment attempts and solving the in-class problems could considerably improve the achievement of the learning outcomes and also related to the understanding of the programming in a sequential manner. Consequently, students should be encouraged to do more assignments and practice problems in learning the programming through online.