Abstract:

Fleming and Mills (1992; Fleming, 1992) found that many students stated that the way teachers presented their learning material was an obstacle. The reason seemed to be associated with a particular sensory preference of each informant. If this preference were relatively stable over time, it could be thought of as a characteristic of the apprentice, and therefore, would be part of the learning style.

Research summary:
Objective:
Describe the sensory learning style of high school students. Compare the sensory preference self-assigned by the student and assigned by a validated instrument.

Methodology:
Participated 582 students of both sexes, from 1st of ESO to 1º of Baccalaureate in 8 educational centers of different ownership (public, private concerted-cooperative, private concerted-religious). The VARK instrument (Fleming and Mills, 1992) was used to assign the sensory style to each participant: V = visual; A = auditory; R = reader; K = kinesthetic.

Analysis and Results:
We use SPSS 22.0 TM for data analysis. The type of educational center did not produce significant differences in the distribution of sensory preferences (test X2, p> 0.11). There appeared a significant predominance of styles that contain the sensory preference K and not the V (K, AK and ARK): 56%. The least frequent were those containing V and not K (V, VA, VR, VAR): 3%. In 53% the resulting style contained the same sensory variety that was self-assigned a priori by the participant, ranging from 86% of those considered a priori "K" and 26% of those considered a priori "V" .

Conclusion:
The perception of the students themselves did not show good reliability, which is associated with an introspective (metacognitive) capacity that can be improved in this regard.

Didactic implications:
Nowadays the planning process for the didactic sequences to be done inside the classroom is the most important action done by secondary school teachers. Knowing the sensory preferences of the students will give an interesting information to define better witch type of resources should be used to present the information to students to ensure the best development into the learning process.

Keywords:

Learning Styles, Science Education, Secondary Students, VARK.