Factors Mining in Engaging Students Learning Styles Using Exploratory Factor Analysis

A number of studies have been conducted to investigate the underlying causes of effective learning through learning styles that may help to improve performance and achievement in the classrooms. Due to its importance, assessing learning styles in the academic fields have been the main focus for future research. Thus, it is paramount to study the preferences of learning styles that create effective learners. Exploratory factor analysis has been used in this study for statistical purposes. Therefore, it is hope that this study could help to produce more students with better academic performance and reduce the failure rate. This study is a preliminary research to assess the learning key factors (LKF) among UniversitiTeknologi MARA students who took Statistics subject. Forty nine (49) respondents were selected using stratum proportion and they were then selected from each stratum using simple random sampling. The exploratory factor analysis of this research suggests that there are five learning key factors (LKF) which account for 67.404% of the total variance with considerably reduce the complexity of the data set by using these components with 33% loss of information. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value is 0.621 and small values of the significance level of Bartlett's test of sphericity (0.000) indicate factor analysis is feasible for this data set. Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization was performed and five factors solution was revealed labelled as attention and concentrating, visual learners, audio learners, kinaesthetic learners and cognitive factors. Main findings suggested that the result of 15-items scale was much more reliable instruments than the initial 27-items scale with Cronbach's alpha correlation coefficients of 0.735. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.