Learning Strategies and Styles in Vocational Education

Vocational education in Hungary has seen significant changes over the past 20 years. However, the adaptivity of the system is largely aggravated by certain problems of content, compensation and selection. As a result, the success of Hungarian public education, as shown by PISA research, lags far behind its possibilities. In our present paper the adaptive model of vocational education is outlined first, where teaching and learning strategies appear as regulating agents with a formative influence on the educational process. The preferred patterns of learning and teaching strategies typical of the individual yield the learning and teaching styles. In the second part of the paper, the results of a longitudinal examination performed among secondary vocational school students in Budapest are presented. The answers to the following questions are sought: how much learning strategy and style can be regarded as an individual characteristic, how it changes with the progress of studies, and whether it shows any correlation with the gender or specialization of the students.