Abstract
This study aims to clarify the relationship between high school students “geography learning styles” and geography learning to consider the nature of geography learning based on learner understanding.
In previous studies, the understanding of the learners’ geography learning style has been examined
through a measure of their entire subject learning understanding. Thus, as understanding geography through these measures is a learning style for overall learning, it cannot be considered a geographyspecific learning style. Instead, to understand the “geography learning styles”, it is reasonable to understand the learners’ style of learning in the context of geography. This study focuses on sensory and perceptual “geography learning styles”, which can be understood by focusing on the sensory stage, in which students accept geography learning content without meaning through their physical organs, and the perceptual stage, in which they receive it as a meaningful coherence, as a continuation of this.
To this end, a questionnaire survey was conducted with high school students(n=607) using a sensory and perceptual “geography learning styles” scale that consisted of “preference of Visual materials”, “preference of Aural/Oral activities in peer group” and “preference of Drawing”. To reveal the learners’ sense and perception of “geography learning styles” and their characteristics, the following three criteria were investigated and analysed: preference for geography, school career situation after graduation as a characteristic of the school and gender.
The results showed that students who had the appropriate sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles” indicators (341 students, 56.2%) tended to have two or three multimodal indicators (250 students, 41.2%) more often than they had unimodal indicators (91 students, 15.0%).
And there were significant differences at the 0.1% level in sensory and perceived “geography learning styles” between high school students who liked geography and those who did not, and between high school students in schools with high rates of higher education and those in schools with diverse career paths. However, although significant differences at the 0.1% level were found by gender in the “preference of visual materials” index and “preference of aural/oral activities in peer group” index, no significant differences at the 0.1% level were shown in the “preference of drawing” index.
Regarding the previous study through the scale of understanding learning styles in general, there
was no significant difference by gender, but in the present study using the scale of sensory-perceptual
“geography learning styles”, there was a significant difference by gender in the “preference of Visual
materials”, “preference of Aural/Oral activities in peer group”.
The sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles” of the high school students included in this study reflect their previous geography learning experiences of visual material activities, group discussions and drawing activities in geography learning. Based on this conception stage, the geography learning experiences given to the students also influence their sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles”.
In this way, the students' sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles” and geography learning can be considered to be in a relationship that mutually influences each other. Thus, it is clear that the geography learning experienced by high school students is a cyclical relationship that again influences their sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles”.
This sensory-perceptual “geography learning styles” of the students is a characteristic that the geography teacher must understand and be aware of, and then design a geography lesson that utilises a two-pronged approach of either matching or deliberately not matching the teaching method.
