Sports science students' learning styles and attitudes to E-learning: A comparison of Turkey-İraq

The country's living conditions are among the key factors that determine individuals' self-awareness and their ability to identify their strengths and weaknesses to complete their learning processes. This study aims to determine and compare the learning styles and attitudes towards e-learning in sports of students pursuing sports sciences education in Turkey and Iraq. The research employed a cross-sectional survey design and quantitative research methods. The study group comprised 494 students pursuing education at Ondokuz Mayıs University Yaşar Doğu Faculty of Sports Sciences (n=163) and Kirkuk University Physical Education Department in Iraq (n=331) during the 2021-2022 academic year. The researcher used a 'Personal Information Form' created for the study, the VARK learning style inventory developed by Fleming and Mills in 1992 and adapted into Turkish by Mustafa Kalkan (2008), and the Attitude Towards E-Learning in Sports Scale developed by Bozkurt and Tamer (2020) as data collection tools. The independent sample t-test was used to compare paired groups that showed normal distribution, and the Mann-Whitney U test was used for those that did not show normal distribution. However, since the data were not normally distributed, the Kruskal Wallis H test was applied for multiple comparisons. The mean scores of students pursuing sports sciences education in Iraq were found to be lower than those of students in Turkey in all variables. The students from both countries preferred kinesthetic learning the most, followed by auditory learning as the second style. 21.54% of the students preferred more than one style in dominant learning styles, while 78.46% preferred a single learning style as dominant. Based on these results, it is recommended to add courses related to e-learning systems to the curricula, regularly determine the learning styles of students pursuing sports sciences education, and reorganize the course curricula in universities based on the regional conditions.