“Education remains a positive, significant, and profitable investment for individuals. On average, another year of education produces a private rate of return to schooling in excess of 5−8% a year. As such, there are few better investments one can make.”
During the course of the 20th century, educational research yielded to the lure of Galileo’s vision of a universe that could be measured in numbers. This was especially true in the United States, where quantification had long enjoyed a prominent place in public policy and professional discourse. But the process of reframing reality in countable terms began eight centuries earlier in Western Europe, where it transformed everything from navigation to painting, then arrived fully formed on the shores of the New World, where it shaped the late-blooming field of scholarship in education. Like converts everywhere, the new American quantifiers in education became more Catholic than the pope, quickly developing a zeal for measurement that outdid the astronomers and mathematicians that preceded them. The consequences for both education and educational research have been deep and devastating..
Source: Labaree, David. (2010). The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers. 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3_2.
Link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.174.2544&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“As every teacher discovers, no two students approach learning in exactly the same way.”
LS definition: “Keefe formally defines learning styles as “characteristic cognitive, affective, and psychological behaviors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment.””
“Awareness of learning style differences can help instructors teach in a manner that effectively reaches most students rather than putting a large
subset of them at a disadvantage.”
Learning Styles 2004 Cassidy’s overview: anyone who wants to start in this subject and needs a precise and global approach. It doesn’t review felder’s learning Styles.
Link: http://www.acdowd-designs.com/
Although its origins have been traced back much further, research in the area of learning style has been active for – at a conservative estimate – around four decades.
Dunn et al is the LS model that show more reliability and validity ratings and more close to Felder’s LS. More use in elementary and secondary schools.
Link: http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/105623
Resume:
“By virtue of its enabling rapid, non-linear access to multiple forms of information, hypermedia technology is considered a major advance in the development of educational tools to enhance learning and a massive literature on the use of hypermedia in education has emerged”
Reasons to use technology: (a) hypermedia enables nonlinear access to a vast amount of information; (Nielsen, 1995) (b) users can explore information on demand (Collier, 1987); (c) student control of their own learning (Barret, 1988); (d) capture student attention (Jonassen, 1989); (e) highly visual (Delany & Gilbert, 1991).
Important characteristics of hypermedia: access, freedom and collaboration (Marchionini and Crane, 1994)