Stail Pembelajaran Pelajar Terhadap Prestasi Akademik Di UiTM Kampus Arau

The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of students demographic factors and their preferred learning stimuli and learning styles with relation to their academic
achievement. Two instruments, the adapted Learning Style Inventory (Dunn, Dunn and Price, 1978) and Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey (Reid, 1984), were administered to a stratified random sample of 339 diploma students from various programs in UiTM Arau Campus. The effect of students backgrounds (parents income and mothers' education level) are found to be significant. Results also indicated that male and female students are found to differ significantly in the environmental and physical stimuli, where the male students are less affected by the stimuli compared to the female students. Both male and female students in all the programs prefer to study in the early morning and at night and also prefer to study in a quiet environment with bright lighting in a formal setting. Among the six types of learning styles, auditory and kinesthetic are the most popular among the students, while individual learning style is the least preferred. The data also showed that male and female students are found to differ significantly in the kinesthetic, tactile and individual style, where the male students are more individual but less kinesthetic and
tactile compared to female students in their learning style. In terms of programs, the overall result indicated that the major learning styles preferred by the students are auditory and kinesthetic and the least preferred styles are individual and visual. The results also showed that science students have a higher mean score preference for kinesthetic, auditory and group styles, business students prefer auditory and kinesthetic styles while engineering students prefer auditory and tactile styles. It was also found that there is a significant difference in their learning styles between programs, where the engineering students are less visual than science and business students. Results also indicated that there is a weak correlation between emotional stimulus and group learning style with students academic performance. Based on the results, a number of recommendations are made to help the lecturers in their teaching by accommodating the students' preferred learning stimuli and learning styles to
their teaching approaches.