Evaluation and revision of the Study Preference Questionnaire: Creating a user-friendly tool for nontraditional learners and learning environments

•We revise Ford’s (1985) Study Preference Questionnaire.•The revision involves content, format and several factor analyses.•The validity of the measure is tested across two samples and languages.•We obtained tentative support for the subscales using confirmatory factor analysis.•The new measure provides a way to categorize learners and examine age and test performance differences.

Numerous learning style instruments have been developed over the years. However, the majority of these instruments have not been psychometrically validated or designed with non-student populations in mind. The aim of this research was to revise an existing measure - Ford's (1985) Study Preference Questionnaire to assess holist vs. serialist processing. This shorter measure was designed to be more user-friendly, applicable to various learning contexts (e.g., as an online tool) and different learner groups. In order to test the new scale properties, the revised measure is tested several times in surveys before being embedded into an e-module. The results obtained for the shortened questionnaire were analyzed using principal axis factoring and confirmatory factor analysis. In terms of transferability and validity, we also considered how the final revised measure performed using data from two samples (English and German), thus establishing the validity of the measure across two samples and languages. In the final step, we examined the degree to which holist, serialist or versatile learners differed in terms of their age characteristics and performance on a learning task.