FACTORS RELATED TO WOMEN’S UNDERGRADUATE SUCCESS

Abstract

This quantitative study examined the relationships and effects of women’s learning styles and achievement and success at a Midwestern, private, Catholic, liberal arts women’s undergraduate program. The primary focus was on first-year female students’ learning styles and how these learning styles may affect their GPAs and decisions to persist to the next academic year. There is a lack of research dedicated to female student learning styles as they relate to student success and achievement, which prompted this endeavor. Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory 3.1 was used to determine student-preferred style of learning. Experiential learning theory justified use of the theoretical model underlying this research as it encompasses the entire individual experience of learning and views learning as a process that occurs as an exchange of internal and external mechanisms. This study aimed to determine specific learning styles of women that tend to achieve and persist at higher rates as well as what specific women’s learning styles require in teaching methods and environmental changes in order to assist women of different learning styles in succeeding. The inventory was administered to 25 first-year, traditional, female students during the spring semester of 2013. GPA and registration information were gathered on each participant at the end of the spring semester and paired with the LSI she had completed at the beginning of the semester. The results of this quantitative study rendered no significance in female student learning style in predicting GPA or persistence. The results may be attributed to the low number of participants, as this reduced power within the statistical models used. However, the descriptive statistics indicated the Assimilating style learner held the highest GPA and highest persistence rate, which may indicate a preferred teaching style used at this institution. Further research is needed with a larger group of first-year female students in order to gain insight into the effects of learning style on GPA and persistence.