Aligning Teaching Strategies with Cognitive and Learning Styles of Students for Enhanced Academic Achievement

Narrative review design is applied to study how teaching strategies can be aligned with various cognitive/learning styles to enhance academic achievement. A total of 60 papers were screened from various databases using both manual and scientific search, applying Boolean operators and keywords to Scopus and Web of Science listed papers. These papers offered deep insight into factors involved in aligning teaching strategies to cognitive styles to enhance academic achievement viz. personality of learners, types of motivation intrinsic or extrinsic dominant in learners, environmental factors in classroom setting, stream of study, and behavioral issues of students. Secondly, the study examined the crucial role of educators in aligning teaching strategies with the cognitive styles of students to enhance academic achievement. Various papers have pointed out that educators should use multimodal approach, shuffle between various teaching strategies and aim to use diverse teaching methods to accommodate students with various styles. Teachers should be fully aware of the learning orientation of their students so that they can adjust mode of instruction suitably. Educators should train students to adapt to a style which is not typical of their personality-“style stretch”, as it can make students more flexible. By understanding the limitations of each style teachers can make adjustment in their strategy of teaching. Educators should aim at increasing the metacognitive awareness of their students. Workshops and seminars should be held to educate various stakeholders of education department about styles students usually adopt in their information processing. Various papers reviewed, talked about cognitive style theories of Kolbe, VARK, Gregory etc. and their relationship with teaching strategies; knowledge of which is important for academic stakeholders. Many papers established that when teaching strategy is congruent with style of students it leads to academic success on most occasions, but this is not proved universally. There are various conditionalities, challenges and practical difficulties in the entire process.