EVALUATION INSTRUMENT OF STYLES OF LEARNING FOR SMALL CHILDREN

In order to identify the students' Learning Style of Early Childhood Education, it has been prepared the Portilho / Beltrami Children's Learning Styles Inventory which presents 12 learning situations, including the four styles: active, reflective, theoretical and pragmatic. The development of this instrument was based on Alonso's theory (1994) on Learning Styles. The learning situations contain sentences and images with different ethnicities, cultures and genres. For the trust and validation process, the instrument was initially used on 28 children from a private school. The analysis method called test-retest was used and the collaboration from teachers and researchers experts in the learning field. The learning situations reproducibility was assessed with an estimated Kappa's coefficient and observing its statistical significance at a 5% level. The second stage of the research comprised seventy-six students aged from five to six years old from a private school and a public city school in Curitiba/PR. The results obtained after the implementation of the Portilho/Beltrami Inventory found that the predominant Learning Style for children aged five and six years old is reflective, both in the private and public city schools. There is no significant difference between the students' gender and age.