An Investigation on Secondary Education Students’ Learning Styles and Use of Social Networks

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the relations between secondary education students’ learning styles and their use of social networks. The samples of the research designed by relational screening model consist of 1281 students reached by convenient sampling method, one of the non-probability sampling methods. In this study, “Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory” and “The Survey of the use Social networks” were used as data collections tools. Frequency, percentage and chi-square techniques were used for data analyses. As a results of the study, it was found that the most used social networks are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google Plus among students. In addition, students use social networks mostly for sharing photo, followed by making friends, sharing videos and playing games respectively. Students who have assimilative learning styles use Facebook, accommodative learning styles use Google Plus, converging styles use Twitter and diverging learning styles use other social networks. Moreover, it was found that students who has accommodative and assimilative learning styles use social networks to share videos, diverging learning styles use social networks to share photos and converging learning styles use social networks to make friends. However, it wasn’t found statistically significance difference between the students’ learning styles and both preferring social networks and the purpose of using them. In the study, it was investigated the relation between students’ learning style based on Kolb’s experiential learning theory and the use of social networks. Apart from Kolb’s Model, it is recommended that some other models like Myers and Briggs’ type indicator model, Lawrence’s learning type model, Fleming and Mill’s learning style model (VARK), Felder and Silverman’s learning style model or Reinert’s learning styles model can be preferred by authors to reveal the relationship with the use of social networks. Thus, the relationships between learning styles, one of the most important individual differences that facilitate learning, and social networks can be revealed in more detail and contribute to the literature on integrating social networking into educational environments.