Exploring the relationships between students´ learning styles and social media use in educational settings

With the growing popularity of Web 2.0 tools in educational settings, it becomes important to investigate the influence of students´ learning styles on the adoption and use of these emerging tools. Currently, there are only few studies addressing this issue and most of them are based on student self-reported data, e.g., preference, acceptance or attitude toward social media tools, captured by means of questionnaires. This paper explores the relationships between actual students´ use of the Web 2.0 tools and their learning styles classified according to Felder-Silverman model. The context of the study is an undergraduate course on Web Applications´ Design, with 45 enrolled students. Several machine learning algorithms for classification, association rule induction and feature selection are applied. Results show that learning styles have a limited influence on the students´ level of interaction with each of the four Web 2.0 tools considered.