Learning styles determine different immigrant students’ results in testing settings: relationship between nationality of children and the stimuli of tasks.

Abstract

Background: Literature presents little examination on the learning styles and sensorial preferences of immigrants during decoding of different tasks in testing contexts. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, non-native children (between 2nd and 12th grade) were divided into six groups determined by country of origin and examined on different stimuli, visual and auditory, associated with four tasks that measure cognitive and linguistic specific abilities. Results: The multivariate analysis confirmed that the children’s nationality significantly explained achievement variability regarding picture recognition and auditory discrimination. η 2 values indicated that there were moderate to larger effects for the nationality as a factor that explains the variance of performance. Conclusions: Results indicate that tasks’ stimuli can effectively assess and differentiate specific young minority groups in order to understand their actual level of preparation and their needs for further learning. The listening input, on the one hand, should be established as the main differentiator for all groups at the time of school entry, but, on the other hand, it should be avoided in Asian groups and Eastern European students during the first stages of second language (L2) learning in European contexts with romance languages as the target learning.