Sexuality education instructional techniques: relationships among teacher usage, student preferences, and student learning styles

This study investigated instructional technique usage of teachers and preferences of students when specific sexuality education topics were taught in the classroom. Also, learning style components of secondary students were identified. Two inventories were developed, one for teachers and one for students. Both consisted of 20 sexuality education topics and 10 instructional techniques commonly used to teach sexuality education. The inventory for students also included 60 learning style items;The sample consisted of 89 Iowa vocational home economics teachers and 334 secondary students. The student sample consisted of 264 females and 70 males;Analysis of data included: (1) frequencies for demographic variables, teacher instructional technique usage, and student instructional technique preferences, (2) chi-square tests of independence to assess differences between instructional technique usage and preferences, (3) principal components factor analysis and Varimax rotation to identify components of learning style, (4) Cronbach\u27s alpha to estimate factor reliabilities, and (5) one-way analyses of variance to assess differences between instructional technique preferences and components of learning style;Large group discussion was most often employed by teachers and preferred by students when teaching about social and emotional aspects of sexuality. Educational media and guest speakers were the instructional techniques that were used by teachers and preferred by students to address some of the physiological aspects of sexuality. Instructional technique usage and preferences varied with the sexuality education topic addressed;Students\u27 instructional technique preferences differed significantly from the instructional techniques teachers utilized for 16 of the 20 sexuality education topics. Significant differences were found between students\u27 instructional technique preferences and the learning style components of motivation, learning with peers, student involvement, and adult supervision when teaching one physiological sexuality topic, three sensitive topics, and three social and emotional topics