Automatically identifying learning styles

Graf et al.(2009) Supporting Teachers in Identifying Students' Learning Styles in Learning Management Systems: An Automatic Student Modelling Approach, Journal of Educational Technology and Society 12(4)

Interesting paper that looks at automatically identifying a learner's learning style by their behaviour in a LMS. A behaviour is associated with each part of a LMS such as visiting a forum, or posing to the forum this is then mapped to a particular learning style. The authors use the Felder-Silverman learning style index. Each behaviour enforces or contradicts a Felder-Silverman learning preference.

The work is evaluated by comparing the results with using the traditional approach to identifying a Felder-Silverman learning style in learners - the ILS questionnaire. Results ranged from a precision of 73.33% to 79.33% - indicating a pretty decent accuracy.

Mapping Learning Styles to Teaching Strategies and Electronic Media

Franzoni and Assar, (2009) Student Learning Styles Adaptation Method Based on Teaching Strategies and Electronic Media, Journal of Educational Technology and Society 12(4)

In this paper Franzoni & Assar looked to map teaching styles to learning styles and differnty types of electronic media to learning styles. The learning style theory used in the paper was Felder and Silverman's'. The work does not focus on e-learning and describes classroom-oriented strategies to satisfy each learner's learning style in a given class. As far as I can see the mappings described are based on intuition. There is no proof that applying a particular teaching style/electronic media to teaching for a particular learning style increases student performance.