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Identifying Learning Styles among Engineering Students

Jamali, A. R and Mohamad, M. M.

Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science, Volume 25, Issue S, May 2017

Keywords: Index of Learning Style (ILS), learning style, survey

Published on: 11 November 2017

Every student learns with different learning preferences in a classroom. In order to know dominant learning preferences, learning styles play a significant role. Studying learning styles is important as contemporary studies have revealed that to increase the value of students' learning process, there should be a match between students' learning styles and teachers' teaching style. Mismatches in teaching style and students' preferred learning style often lead to poor academic performance among students. Therefore, the main purpose of this research was to explore learning styles of engineering students in the Faculty of Technical and Vocational Education, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. Forty-six students from the Electrical, Civil and Mechanical Engineering disciplines participated in this study. The instrument used is the survey questionnaire based on the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) by Felder and Silverman that consists of 44 items. The ILS consists of four dimensions, each with two sub-scales: process (active-reflective), perceive (sensing-intuitive), input (visual-verbal) and understanding (sequential-global). Each main dimension has 11 items. Data were analysed using SPSS 20.0. The analysis showed that in the process dimension, 57.11% of the participants were active learners, while 42.86% were reflective learners; in the perceive dimension, 54.54% were sensing learners and 45.45%, reflective learners; in the input dimension, 76.87% were visual learners and 23.12%, verbal learners; and in the understanding dimension, 52.96% were sequential learners and 47.03%, global learners. This study highlights that knowing the preferred learning style of students will help teachers to create a classroom environment that suits students' needs so that their academic achievement can be easily enhanced.

ISSN 1511-3701

e-ISSN 2231-8542

Article ID

JSSH-S0470-2017

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