Does Culture Influence Learning Styles of Business Students? A Comparative Study of Two Cultures

Abstract

This paper presents the usage of the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) instrument based on the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model to investigate the influence of culture on learning style distribution of business students. Western culture was represented by the United States and was compared with middle-eastern culture represented by Egypt. Results of this study show that majority of business students have a balanced learning style in each of the four learning style dimensions of the Felder-Silverman model both in the U. S. and in Egypt. Difference in learning style distribution of business students between the U. S. and Egypt was statistically significant only for the sensing-intuitive and visual-verbal dimensions of the Felder-Silverman model. The difference was not statistically significant for the active-reflective and the sequential-global dimensions