A Study on Learning Styles of University Music Majors

[[abstract]]This research aimed to investigate the distribution and the affecting factors of the learning styles of undergraduate music majors. Samples came from 9 universities with music departments in Taipei areas. Using random sampling, this research sampled 20 sophomores and 20 senior students from each university, 360 samples in total. This research utilized the Kolb’s theory as the reference to design the questionnaire. There were two purposes of this research: 1. to understand the distribution of students’ learning styles of undergraduate music majors; 2. to investigate the differences in students’ learning styles due to the difference of student backgrounds. From this study, it was found that “accommodating” is the dominant style from the point of view of gender, grade, major, school system and whether the students are from the musically talented program or not. The factors affecting the learning style can be summarized as follows: (1) Gender can affect the dimensions of abstract conceptualization and reflective observation, and it was more obvious for male than female. (2) Year is irrelevant to the learning style. (3) The different majors have no effect on the learning style except there is a difference among the dimension of concrete experience: students majoring in string instruments tended to be more diverging and accommodating than piano majors. (4) Students from the art school system tend to be more diverging and accommodating than the students from normal systems, and tend to be more diverging as compared with the students from comprehensive school systems. (5) Whether the students are educated from the musically talented program in their elementary and junior high school studies or not has no effect on their learning style. The students from senior high school musically talented program tend to be more diverging and accommodating. (6) Grades in their majors are correlated with the grades of concrete experience, reflective observation and active experimentation; therefore, the higher the grades in their majors, the more tendency to be diverging or accommodating. According to the results of this research, some suggestions are proposed for the teachers and students, and future studies.