Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Students are exponents of educational endeavors. They are the focal points of the
curriculum design and the bases of academic reforms. Thus, they have to be welcomed in school
with care, love and sincerity despite the natural tendencies, attributes, and philosophies they
possess.

School is holistically acknowledge as venue that plays crucial roles in every child’s
development. This is one of the main reasons why educational management and supervision
have to consider the nature of learners in decision-making before innovations are made.
Accordingly, administrators have to ensure that every step taken should guarantee students
gratification towards quality instruction wherein skills, talents, knowledge and abilities are
honed. Mosely, D., et.al. (2004) mentioned that the inability of schools to take account of
preferences produces endemic low achievement and poor motivation. Undeniably, this notion is
a challenge to school administrators for they have to go afar to understand the core concept of
the model in order to adapt to an extensive view of students natural tendencies and needs to
endow with a learning environments that transforms learners into well performing individuals.

On the other hand, it is said that every individual has his own strengths and weaknesses.
He uses these strengths most of the time to achieve his goals and aspirations since strengths
usually function as person’s genuine style of surviving. In education, learning, an ultimate goal of
each educator ,is attained when learners’ strengths are properly addressed and given great deal
of attention. Apparently, making a correspondence between individual differences and
curriculum design could possibly lead to the efficacy of teacher-students interaction.

Furthermore, learning styles preference plays an imperative function in students’ way of

learning by means of serving as catalyst of acquiring concepts and well skills. Mager and McCann
(1961) found out that students achieve significantly higher scores when taught through
approaches that respond to their individual learning needs. Moreover, they said that students
learn different from each other. Therefore, they should be permitted to have options and
choices in completing tasks. Hence, students are motivated when they exercise control over
their own studies.

Inimitable skills, talents, abilities including what constitutes students’ identities are
innately given to them which had better be developed with total respect and understanding.
Curriculum makers tend to overlook and ignore these certainties for they force learners to adopt
their teaching styles. This could probably be the reason why some teachers are loathed by their
students for they are treated as machine capable of accommodating and absorbing all pieces of
information prescribed to be inculcated in their young minds under the so-called aristocratic
means of instruction. Also, it is believed that educator teaches to direct students in the course
of being humans but the truth is he fails when he forgets to let them use their free will and
intellect in searching the reality in accordance to their own capabilities and manners.

Agapay (1991) emphasizes that a person is an individual who exists separately and
independently from others and who is capable of knowing , loving in an intellectual way, and in
deciding for himself the mean or end of his actions.

Moreover, he is vested with rational nature which enables him to adjust to his
atmosphere. Dr. Kenneth and Rita Dunn( 1978) developed an internationall acclaimed model
known as “The learning Styles” that give emphasis on the ways students begin to learn , process,
absorb, and retain new and difficult information. There are other major learning styles models
but the researcher choose Dunn’s for some simple reasons observed in the teaching –learning
process, so since its success has been tested in US and international schools already, this is now
the apt time to either investigate or adopt innovations for realization of quality education
particulary in Luna National High School.

More so, there are diverse abilities uncovered by the curriculum which need to be
recognized by both educators and school administrators as far as interests and appreciations are
concerned. Much pedagogical research has focused on the concept of “learning styles” Dunn
and Dunn (1978) and Wiliams (2010) have stressed that the ability to typify student learning
styles can augment the educational experience. Thus, administrators must take appropriate
steps to orient and train their educators to tailor own learning style and keep it congruent with
students’ learning style.

Plutarch’s dictum “the brain is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled” is a line
perfectly in parallel to the aims of raising students’ lore. Nowadays , we know that they live with
modern media and learn best by working independently and freely. Consequently, teachers
have to organize their instruction to provide the best possible support for students’ individual
learning asthey help develop their own skills, talents and knowledge. Thus, school authorities
have to respond with such needs to ake linear designs in the references used , learning tasks
conducted, policies implemented, and students’ individual differences.

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