A Comparative Analysis of Preferred Learning and Teaching Styles for Engineering, Industrial, and Technology Education Students and Faculty

Learning styles are personal qualities that influence the way students interact with their learning environment, peers, and teachers (Alkhasawe, Mrayyan, Docherty, Alashram, & Yousef, 2008). According to Felder and Silverman (1988), mismatches exist between common and traditional learning styles of engineering students and traditional teaching styles of engineering professors. Felder (1996) indicates that the Felder-Silverman model classifies students as fitting into one of the following four learning style dimensions: • Sensing learners (concrete, practical, oriented towards facts and procedures) or intuitive learners (conceptual, innovative, oriented towards theories and meanings); • Visual learners (prefer visual representations of presented material— pictures, diagrams, flow charts) or verbal learners (prefer written and spoken explanations); • Active Learners (learn by trying thins out, working with others) or reflective learners (learn by thinking things through, working alone); • Sequential learners (linear, orderly, learn in small incremental steps) or global learners (holistic, systems thinkers, learn in large leaps) (Felder, 1996, p. 19). According to the model, “engineering instructors who adapt their teaching style to include both poles of each of the given dimensions should come close to providing an optimal learning environment for most (if not all) students in a class” (Felder & Silverman, 1988, p. 675). One common discrepancy is that most people, college age and older, are visual learners (Barber & Milone, 1981), while most college teaching is verbal. Also, according to Felder and Silverman (1988), a second learning/teaching style mismatch exists, this one between the preferred input modality of most students and the preferred presentation mode of most professors. Ernst and Clark (2008) state that, in the discipline of engineering/technical graphics, many researchers have studied the use of learning styles of students in both lecture and laboratory situations, but few have attempted to link their research to instructor bias in the classroom. In an ideal setting, these two factors would be aligned since matching teaching strategies to a students' preferred learning style not only promotes understanding, but information is more likely to be retained, leading to a higher level of understanding (Wittmann-Price & Godshall, 2009). However, most professors will teach the way they were taught, even to the detriment of student learning