Learning styles emerged as a framework in the 1970s in an effort to enrich
teaching methods and to explain the factors that account for differences in
how students learn (Dunn & Dunn, 1979; Keefe, 1979; Kolb, 1976). Kolb
(1976) developed a learning style preference instrument (LSI) to complement
his experiential learning model (ELM). Kolb’s model has been adopted
widely across the management and educational fields (McMullan&Cahoon,
1979; Pigg, Busch,&Lacey, 1980; Plovnick, 1975;Veres, Sims,&Locklear,
1991), with the level of interest in the model exemplified by the use of the LSI
in more than 150 studies by the turn of the previous decade (Geiger, 1991).
More recently, Kolb’s LSI has been a focus of current research (de Ciantis &