Learning Styles and Typologies of Cultural Differences: A Theoretical and Empirical Comparison

This study presents the relationship between six typologies of cultural differences and the learning styles of Kolb's learning model. Several cross-cultural studies about learning styles indicate that learning styles may differ from one culture to another, but few studies have addressed the question of which culture is related to which learning style or ability. The present study concerns this inquiry. Exploration of this inquiry has been made in two parts. The first part investigates conceptual analogies and relationships between Kolb's model and the six cultural typologies in the domains of anthropology, cross-cultural management, and cross-cultural psychology. The second part focuses on the empirical results of six comparative studies about cross-cultural differences in learning styles in the past and discusses how six propositions generated from the first theoretical examination can reflect upon their past empirical results. Those two examinations suggest that particular culture, as categorized in those domains, relates to certain learning styles or abilities.