The Effects of Learning Styles of Pre-service Teachers on Their Sketchnotes Designs

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the effect of the pre-service teachers’ dominant learning styles on their sketchnotes designs prepared for science topics as well as determining their reasons for the visual and written elements used in these sketchnotes. The study was designed following descriptive correlational survey model. The participants consisted of 44 teacher pre-service of science teaching at grades two and three studying at Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University. The quantitative data for the study was obtained through “Verbal and Visual Dominant Learning Style Scale” developed by Akgün et al. (2014) while the qualitative data was gathered from the participants’ sketchnotes prepared for various science topics in the secondary school science curriculum. The findings indicate that the majority of the participants had visual dominant learning style. As the participants with visual dominant learning style gave prominence to visuals by using drawings and various writing styles frequently in their sketchnotes, the ones with verbal dominant learning styles used more words and sentences along with frequent textual detailed explanations. It was also found that the participants with visual dominant learning style placed more importance to process building, grouping, and listing and the ones with verbal dominant learning styles placed more emphasize on explanations. The findings of the study are meant to introduce sketchnotes to teachers and to promote the use of them in their teaching practices.