Abstract
The first year students are facing difficulties in learning C programming language when the module is being offered in their first year tenure. Ultimately, this leads to an increased failure rates in this module. On the other hand, even the faculties are having strenuous time teaching this module. The main aim of the case study is to assess and determine the different learning styles of first year students from Bachelors of engineering in Information Technology (BE1IT). And then, know the majority of the students’ preferred learning style so that the faculties teaching C programming language are made aware about the findings. And also, recommend the faculty to re-design their pedagogical material to cater students as per their various learning styles. The VARK learning style inventory was adopted for the study which consists of 17 questionnaires. A class of BE1IT with 40 students comprising of 16 female and 24 male students were the participants. All the students were asked to take into consideration of themselves in how they learn best with the module - C programming language and then accordingly attempt those questionnaires and the data was collected. The study showed that majority of the students are kinaesthetic learner irrespective of the genders. The faculty teaching the first year students need to understand that this method may be helpful in helping the students learn better. The pedagogical materials used to teach them may be one of the factor which is not helping them to learn better as it is not correlating with their learning styles. After having known the different type of learners, the faculty were made aware of the findings and were recommended to re-design their pedagogy and andragogy materials accordingly to cater all the students’ learning. Keywords: Learning styles, C programming language, VARK learning style model, Kinaesthetic DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/11-1-02 Publication date: January 31 st 2021
Highlights
Programming courses are very important components of the curriculum to be studied especially in the field of Information Technology, science, mathematics and Engineering (Rosminah, Derus & Ali, 2012)
The findings showed that Solomon-Felder which is another learning style model is the most used model
VAK/VARK learning style questionnaire was being selected for the assessment (VARK, 2019)
Summary
Programming courses are very important components of the curriculum to be studied especially in the field of Information Technology, science, mathematics and Engineering (Rosminah, Derus & Ali, 2012). Even in CST, the first year students are finding the programming module very complex and difficult to learn leading to higher failure rate compared to other modules. One of the effective strategy that can help students learn better with this module could be by understanding their learning style and designing the pedagogical materials. There could be a better ways to teach the C programming language if a tutor know their students’ learning styles. This require scrupulous study to know the students’ learning styles and take up the responsibility to design the pedagogical materials with which they can teach in a way that makes them understand better. A study by Thomas and his team (2002), found out that some student’s learning styles are more suited to learning programming than others, so there is a need to do the assessment and know the BE1IT students’ learning style that best suits to learn C programing language module
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