Specific differences and similarities in the learning preferences of engineering students

Abstract

The Index of learning Styles (ILS) being developed by Felder and Soloman classifies a student's overall learning preferences on four dimensions. It expresses whether the students learning style tends to favor active or reflective processing, sensing or intuitive perception, visual or verbal presentation and sequential or global assimilation. Version I of the ILS consists of twenty weight forced-choice items, from which seven items refer to each of the four dimensions. A large group (n=858) of engineering students at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) has completed the ILS and their overall responses show a preference for an active (69%), sensing (59%), visual (80%), and sequential (67%) learning style. Although these learning preferences do not necessarily indicate the teaching methods which would enable the students to learn best, it would certainly contribute negatively to their learning if they were consistently taught in a way that conflicted with their preferred learning style. The ILS item responses from these UWO engineering students have also been analysed for separate subgroups such as male/female, first-year/senior year and extravert/introvert and these analyses have yielded significantly different preferences for some of the specific learning items. This paper describes the characteristics and learning preferences associated with each of the four ILS dimensions and presents the overall engineering student responses. It also presents those specific ILS items which elicited significantly different responses between the various subgroups of engineering students.