Learning styles in mathematics – the strength of the motivational factors at 10th grade Portuguese students

Résumé En

This paper reports on a research project aimed at describing the learning styles in mathematics of the Portuguese students at the 10th grade and at relating them to the students’ performance. For this quantitative, descriptive and correlational research, we used an adaptation of the ILS (Inventory of Learning Styles) of Vermunt (1994) that was answered by a sample of 579 students. An important result was the detection of a learning style that is strongly correlated to the motivational learning orientations, being however still undefined it what concerns the cognitive processing strategies. This style, if hold in a favorable context, may turn into a “meaning oriented” learning style. We also detected the four styles usually reported at Vermunt’s ILS’ applications: “meaning oriented”, “reproduction oriented”, “application oriented” and “not oriented”, as well as the positive contribution of a “meaning oriented” style to the scholar performance in mathematics, opposite to the effect of the “reproduction oriented” one.