INVESTIGATING LEARNING STYLES AND TEACHING STYLES EFFECTS ON HAPPINESS IN THE CLASSROOM: A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS IN THREE COUNTRIES

Higher Education institutions are in search of strategies for effective changes. In recent years, the conceptual transformation of teaching in institutions of Higher Education has been a process that responds to a new educational paradigm, "from teaching to learning”. This situation has led to important changes in the way in which the students assimilate information required in their learning process.

Learning styles and teaching styles are revealed as two key factors for success in the classroom. Focusing on the educational environment, happiness and well-being in the classroom have become necessary in Higher Education. However, definitions and measurements of some concepts are difficult to get. For this reason, it is important to develop conceptual and empirical frameworks describing student satisfaction and taking a generic starting point, based on the existing pedagogical and business literature.

In an educational context, satisfaction is defined as the subjective assessment carried out by the student him/herself of his/her experiences and results with education and student life. Satisfaction is an emotional response of the student as a result of a global perception of all the attributes that compose his/her learning experience; therefore, satisfaction is a signal of the user favorable attitude to the learning process.

In this paper, a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature was conducted at universities in Mexico, Portugal and Chile between August and November 2015, within the framework of an international research of teaching innovation supported by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. The ultimate aim of this work is to assess the impact of learning styles and teaching styles on student satisfaction, considering some personal characteristics as the gender of the students.

The intention in this research is to provide relatively simple frameworks, drawing as far as possible on concepts couched in educational language. The conceptualization that we have developed is related to approaches to teaching, but so far draws mainly on the literature of what has come to be called student learning research.

This work is grounded in a constructivist, socio-cultural framework based on theories put forth by Piaget and Inhelder (1971) and Brunner (1977). The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that perception and mental imagery are developed as life-long processes. Brunner socio-cultural theory highlights the importance of individual differences based on environmental influences and methods of representation used. Based on theories pointed out by Seligman (2009 and 2011), this research is further guided by hierarchical models of cognition that include several elements such as verbal, perceptual and image-rotation. This paper is founded on empirical evidence demonstrating that several skills can be learned and are strongly linked with academic and professional success.