Kolb’s Learning Style Instrument: Sensitive to Gender

Abstract

Kolb’s experiential learning theory, developed in the 1970s, continues to be influential in the educational and management fields. To complement his theory, Kolb developed a learning style preference instrument (LSI) that has been continually hampered by poor psychometric performance. Whether these problems are due to poorly differentiated theory and/or instrument error has been the focus of debate. The principal finding reported in the present study is that the LSI, as modified by Kolb in 1985, is gender sensitive for an Australian cohort of 1st-year university students. For females, the results of a factor analysis were consistent with Kolb’s theory. For males, the results were consistent with previous studies that found the instrument yielded scores with poor construct validity.