Instructional material designed to incorporate learning styles may increase

students' motivation to learn, (Larkin-Hein, 2000); however, more research is warranted

in this area. Few studies have been conducted to measure the impact of curriculum

delivered in a learning style different than the student. Nor have studies been conducted

to examine how instructional discourse of a dissimilar learning style relates to a student's

stress and motivation in the classroom; an assertion of Kirton's A-I theory.

 The primary focus of research and practice of learning style theory is aligning

curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of diverse learning styles in a given

classroom (Curry, 1990). However, much of the literature fails to recognize the learning

style of the instructor and how this variable plays in the context of the classroom. The

effect of dissimilar learning styles of people working together to develop a new idea or

product and the stress resulting from this interaction is lacking in the literature (Smulders,

2004); yet the study of this phenomenon is the aim of A-I theory (Kirton, 2003). Since

students and teachers of different learning styles commonly come together in a classroom

to generate ideas with varying degrees of motivations, attitudes and stressors, it is clear

that many research questions are still unanswered.

 Limitations have been placed on the application of learning styles in the

classroom. After an extensive review of the literature, Coffield, Moseley, Hall and

Ecclestone (2004) cautioned practitioners' application of learning styles in the classroom

as many types of style have little theoretical backing, low reliability and insufficient

validity. Furthermore, few studies have found learning styles to "explain more than 16%

of the variance in academic achievement" (p. 127). Other authors have agreed that many

measures of learning style are psychometrically weak and therefore offer little use to the