Understanding Student Differences

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2005 by Felder, Richard M, Brent, Rebecca

ABSTRACT

Students have different levels of motivation, different attitudes about teaching and learning, and different responses to specific classroom environments and instructional practices. The more thoroughly instructors understand the differences, the better chance they have of meeting the diverse learning needs of all of their students. Three categories of diversity that have been shown to have important implications for teaching and learning are differences in students' learning styles (characteristic ways of taking in and processing information), approaches to learning (surface, deep, and strategic), and intellectual development levels (attitudes about the nature of knowledge and how it should be acquired and evaluated). This article reviews models that have been developed for each of these categories, outlines their pedagogical implications, and suggests areas for further study.

Keywords: learning styles, approaches to learning, intellectual development

"Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner. Put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he learns and the way he understands it."

-Kierkegaard

I. THREE FACETS OF STUDENT DIVERSITY

Declining interest in engineering among high school students in recent years has led to steep enrollment decreases in many engineering programs. Although the problem has been exacerbated by the high student dropout rates that have characterized engineering curricula for decades, many engineering faculty members continue to view the attrition positively, believing the dropouts are mainly weak students who are unqualified to become engineers. This belief is wrong. In their classic study Talking about Leaving [1], Seymour and Hewitt showed that grade distributions of students who leave technical curricula are essentially the same as the distributions of those who stay in. While many of those who drop out do so because of academic difficulties, many others are good students who leave because of dissatisfaction with their instruction, a fact made graphically clear in comments quoted by Seymour and Hewitt.

Faculty complaints about students who remain in engineering through graduation are also commonly heard, with many of the complaints being variations of "They can memorize and plug numbers into formulas but they don't know how to think!" And yet, most engineering departments have one or more faculty members who manage to get many of those same students to perform at remarkably high levels, displaying first-rate problem-solving and critical and creative thinking skills. Skill deficiencies observed in engineering graduates must therefore also be attributable in part to what instructors are doing or failing to do.

An implication of these observations is that to reduce enrollment attrition and improve the thinking and problem-solving skills of engineering graduates, engineering schools should attempt to improve the quality of their teaching, which in turn requires understanding the learning needs of today's engineering students and designing instruction to meet those needs. The problem is that no two students are alike. They have different backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses, interests, ambitions, senses of responsibility, levels of motivation, and approaches to studying. Teaching methods also vary. Some instructors mainly lecture, while others spend more time on demonstrations or activities; some focus on principles and others on applications; some emphasize memory and others understanding. How much a given student learns in a class is governed in part by that student's native ability and prior preparation but also by the compatibility of the student's attributes as a learner and the instructor's teaching style.

This is not to say that instructors should determine their students' individual learning attributes and teach each student exclusively in the manner best suited to those attributes. It is not possible to discover everything that affects what a student learns in a class, and even if instructors could, they would not be able to figure out the optimum teaching style for that student-the task would be far too complex. Moreover, even if a teacher knew the optimum teaching styles for all students in a class, it would be impossible to implement them simultaneously in a class of more than two students.

If it is pointless to consider tailoring instruction to each individual student, it is equally misguided to imagine that a single one-size-fits-all approach to teaching can meet the needs of every student. Unfortunately, a single approach has dominated engineering education since its inception: the professor lectures and the students attempt to absorb the lecture content and reproduce it in examinations. That particular size fits almost nobody: it violates virtually every principle of effective instruction established by modern cognitive science and educational psychology [2-5]. Any other approach that targets only one type of student would probably be more effective, but it would still fail to address the needs of most students. It follows that if completely individualized instruction is impractical and one-size-fits-all is ineffective for most students, a more balanced approach that attempts to accommodate the diverse needs of the students in a class at least some of the time is the best an instructor can do.