The relationships among Kolb Learning Style Inventory profiles, age, education level, and performance in an adult introductory computer course

This experimental study investigated the relationships among learning styles on the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, Education, Age and success at an Introductory Computer Course for adults. A wide range of adult learners who were attending various medical training courses at the Army Medical Department Center and School took a fifteen hour introduction to computers module. The module had-three hour training classes in Word Perfect 5.1 word processing, Enable 4.0 database (a software product similar to DBASE III), Enable 4.0 spreadsheet (a product similar to LOTUS 123), and Harvard Graphics 2.3. A hands on pre-test and post-test was used to measure learning in the course. No differences based on age, education, or learning style were identified for database or spreadsheet training. Subjects with greater than sixty semester hours of college and less than or equal to a B.A. learned significantly more in the word processing module than did learners with less than sixty semester hours of college (p = 0.2). Subjects under the age of twenty-five learned more than subjects over thirty (p = 0.10). Subjects under twenty-five learned more than subjects older than thirty at graphics (p = 0.10). Subjects older than twenty-five and less than or equal to thirty also learned more than those older than thirty-five (p = 0.10). Accommodators on the Kolb Learning Style Inventory learned more than the other 3 learning styles at graphics (p = 0.05).