Effects of matching teaching strategy to thinking style on learner’s quality of reflection in an online learning environment

Reflection plays an important role in improving learning performance. This study, therefore, attempted to explore whether learners’ reflection levels can be improved if teaching strategies are adapted to fit with learners’ thinking styles in an online learning environment. Three teaching strategies, namely constructive, guiding, and inductive, were designed to match with three thinking styles, namely legislative, executive, and judicial respectively. An online reflection learning system was subsequently developed to reflect this scenario. An experiment was then conducted where the learners were classified into fit or non-fit group in order to analyze whether there was a good fit between the teaching strategies designed by the teacher and the thinking styles of learners. A total of 223 graduate and undergraduate students participated in the experiment. The results revealed that the reflection levels of the fit group had outperformed the non-fit group.

Research highlights
► Reflection plays an important role in learning process and helps learners improve learning performance.
► Learners provided with adaptive teaching strategies matched with their thinking styles have better progress on reflection levels.
► Learners with different thinking styles should be assigned to fitting learning situations using adaptive teaching strategies.