History of Berry's Learning Style Assessment

Berry's Learning Style Assessment began as an experiment in a math lab. After using an assessment belonging to someone else and realizing that information about how students learn could improve and speed up the tutoring process for college math students, Susan Berry decided to design a questionnaire of her own. After much research concerning learning styles, she developed a questionnaire that seemed to answer the question of why some students do better in college math than others. This investigation continued during a graduate class about testing and assessment. Ms. Berry and a student partner designed an assessment to be used for two groups of developmental math students, one group was in high school and the other group was from Ms. Berry"s Math Center at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College. The results were interesting but not conclusive in any way.

As Ms. Berry continued the requirements for her specialist degree, she decided to use an aspect of learning styles for her research project. Her research question was:" Is there a difference between the learning styles of those students who use the math center and those who do not?"

The research conclusion was that there was a significant difference in the active/reflective category where those who were more reflective utilized the math center while those who were more active did not.

Possible conclusions from the research would be that the math center needs to provide more group work for active students to work together and the classroom might want to provide more contemplative time for reflective students, especially after introducing new material so they can process new concepts.

At the conclusion of the thesis research, Ms. Berry revised her assessment to include the characteristic of active/reflective as this has a significant impact on how and if students seek assistance. Her work continues to expand as the learning styles are looked at as a way to help online students get more from their classes and if learning styles information can help high school students improve their success.

Validity and Reliability

In the realm of testing and assessment, validity (does it measure what you want it to measure) and reliability (does it consistently measure the same thing) are very important. Repeated evaluations have revealed similar results even for different versions of the assessment. This shows that indeed the assessment if reliable. Validity is measured by having the person assessed read the descriptive paragraph suggested by their score and verify whether it describes them or not. Having given the assessment well over one thousand times, the majority of people assessed agree with the description of their style, thus verifying its validity.

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