Background of the Study

Education has become the main backbone of every person in building up their

future. Especially for the people who want to enter a more professional set up

of work. Students approach studying in different ways that help them to cope

up easily in their lessons and learn in the most effective way. Somehow,

learning styles can vary in many types that have an important role on their

cognitive skills. One can learn simply just by reading quietly using their eyes

and mind for processing the information, others have to read aloud the lesson

that they are studying to be able to remember it well.

Learning styles according to Chick (2010) is widely used to describe how

learners gather, sift through, interpret, organize, come to conclusions about,

and “store” information for further use. As spelled out in VARK (one of the

most popular learning styles inventories), these styles are often categorized by

sensory approaches: visual, aural, verbal [reading/writing], and kinesthetic.

Many of the models that don’t resemble the VARK’s sensory focus are

reminiscent of Felder and Silverman’s Index of Learning Styles, with a

continuum of descriptors for how learners process and organize information:

active-reflective, sensing-intuitive, verbal-visual, and sequential-global (Chick,

N. 2010).
Learning styles have an important role in student learning because it helps

them to efficiently understand the lessons. Its important role doesn’t end with

this; learning styles is also important for our cognitive skills. According to

Mulko (2022) Cognitive skills are a set of mental abilities related to the way our

brain deals with the information about the world around us — including past

experiences, what we perceive with our senses, our thoughts, and reasoning.

Although the word “cognition” refers to the action or process of acquiring

knowledge, cognitive functions can also be carried out by resorting to

previously obtained knowledge. Examples of cognitive skills include short-term

and long-term memory, language production and processing, problem-solving

abilities, and making predictions based on pattern recognition (Mulko, M.

2022).

Through our learning styles we help our cognitive skills to develop and find

their weaknesses by trying out their capacity to process information, develop a

longer attention span on a certain topic, make a faster solution to a problem,

and enhance their memory. According to Roberts (2014) Memory is highly

impacted by learning style. Once a persons’ learning style is understood and

accommodated for, memory will improve. When people understand their

learning style, they can adapt how they learn to most efficiently use their

brains, including and improving their memory capability.

Rather than memorization, students who are aware of their cognitive learning

styles are able to fully comprehend the information they have learned. They

understand the reasons behind complex topics and are more likely to retain

information to further build on that knowledge.. According to Graf et al. (2008)

Learning styles that are reflective, intuitive, and sequential are preferred by

students with high working memory capacity, whereas active, sensory, visual,

and global learning styles are preferred by students with low working memory

capacity.

Other cognitive abilities include logic thinking, which facilitates the generation

of ideas and problem-solving by examining, extrapolating, and comprehending

the relevant data. Learners have different ways to acquire knowledge on any

theme. Adaptive learning is one of the methods intended for the acquisition of

knowledge in a dynamic way. Different learners have different needs; they

differ, for example, in their learning goals, their prior knowledge, their learning

styles, and their cognitive abilities.  (Balasubramanian and Anouncia 2018)