Empirical Study Of Effects Of Learning Styles And Satisfaction On Learning Performance In Virtual Learning Community

With the advent and development of Internet technology, virtual learning community(VLC) is widely used in educational practice because of its advantages in convenience, efficiency and interactivity. Since VLC is easily accessed, has rich learning and researching resources and convenient interacting platform, it becomes more and more popular among educators and researchers. However, some learners did not really benefit from or were not actually engaged in the learning activities, because some of the learning approaches in VLC were not matched with their preferred learning styles or the students have insufficient learning satisfaction towards VLC. What is the current situation of students’ satisfaction towards using VLC as a learning tool? Which learning style is best fit for the instructional approaches used by VLC? How do different learning styles and satisfaction affect students’ learning performance in VLC? Even though a large number of researches on VLC have been made in recent years, limited research has investigated the influence of different learning styles and satisfaction on learners’ learning performance in VLC. This study will fill this gap through investigating the effects of different learning styles, learning satisfaction on students’ learning performance in VLC and finding out which learning style and what degrees of learning satisfaction could result in better learning performance by using VLC as learning tool.This research was conducted by using questionnaires survey of a total of 149 students who have participated in college English learning course for at least a semester in Sakai virtual learning platform of Chongqing University. Kolb’s learning style inventory was employed in this research to identify each participant’s learning style. Social cognitive theory provided theoretical basement for the self-compiled learning satisfaction scale. And students’ learning performance was assessed from the two aspects: students’ regular performance and final test scores. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to examine the reliability and validity of learning satisfaction questionnaire. GLM-Multivariate analysis was used to verify the significant influence of different learning styles and satisfaction on students’ performance of English learning in virtual world supported by Sakai. And One-Way ANOVA was applied to probe into the relations between learning styles and learning satisfaction towards using Sakai as a learning tool.Through the quantitative analysis, the author comes to the following conclusions: 1) Overall, students are satisfied with learning in Sakai virtual platform and the rich learning resources are especially welcomed and praised by the learners. However, students have lower computer self-efficacy as they have no confidence in their own capabilities related to computer operation. 2) Different learning styles have significant influence on students’ regular performance in virtual course platform. And students with accommodating and converging learning styles performed better compared with the diverging and assimilating learning styles on Sakai, which indicates that the students preferring to learning through practical experience tend to have better regular performance than those preferring to watching and observing. 3) Students with different satisfaction towards Sakai have significant different regular performance while no significant differences exist in their final test scores. 4) No significant relations between learning styles and learning satisfaction were found in the Sakai virtual learning context. 5) Different learning styles and satisfactions have significant effects on students’ regular performance in Sakai. And Accommodators performed better with the increase of their satisfaction towards Sakai. However, there was no significant influence of different learning styles and learning satisfaction on learning performance with respect to students’ final test scores.In light of these findings, the author proposed some suggestions about ways of enhancing students’ satisfaction towards Sakai, making full use of VLC to improve the quality of teaching and learning in VLC and optimizing Sakai virtual platform.