Understanding Student Differences

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

2. What type of sensory information is most effectively perceived: visual (pictures, diagrams, flow charts, demonstrations) or verbal (written and spoken explanations)?

3. How does the student prefer to process information: actively (through engagement in physical activity or discussion) or reflectively (through introspection)? This scale is identical to the active-reflective scale of the KoIb model and is related to the extravert-introvert scale of the MBTI.

4. How does the student characteristically progress toward understanding: sequentially (in a logical progression of incremental steps) or globally (in large "big picture" jumps)? Sequential learners tend to think in a linear manner and are able to function with only partial understanding of material they have been taught. Global learners think in a systemsoriented manner, and may have trouble applying new material until they fully understand it and see how it relates to material they already know about and understand. Once they grasp the big picture, however, their holistic perspective enables them to see innovative solutions to problems that sequential learners might take much longer to reach, if they get there at all [48].

More detailed descriptions of the attributes of the different model categories and the nature and consequences of learning and teaching style mismatches are given by Felder and Silverman [13] and Felder [32]. Zywno and Waalen [36] report on the development and successful implementation of hypermedia instruction designed to address the learning needs of styles less favored by traditional instruction, and Sharp [40] describes an instructional module based on the Felder-Silverman model that makes students aware of differences in learning styles and how they may affect personal interactions, teamwork, interactions with professors, and learning difficulties and successes.

2) The index of learning styles: The Index of Learning Styles� (ILS) is a forty-four-item forced-choice instrument developed in 1991 by Richard Felder and Barbara Soloman to assess preferences on the four scales of the Felder-Silverman model. In 1994 several hundred sets of responses to the initial twenty-eight-item version of the instrument were collected and subjected to factor analysis. Items that did not load significantly on single factors were discarded and replaced by new items to create the current version, which was put on the World Wide Web in 1997 [49]. The ILS is available at no cost to individuals who wish to assess their own preferences and to instructors or students who wish to use it for classroom instruction or research, and it may be licensed by non-educational organizations.

Learning style preferences of numerous students and faculty members have been determined using the Index of Learning Styles, with results summarized in Table 1 [50]. Unless otherwise indicated, the population samples shown in Table 1 arc undergraduates. Thus, for example, of the 129 undergraduate engineering students who completed the ILS in a study conducted at Iowa State University, 63 percent were classified as active (A) learners (and by implication 37 percent were classified as reflective learners), 67 percent were sensing (S) learners (33 percent intuitive learners), 85 percent were visual (Vs) learners (15 percent verbal), and 58 percent were sequential (Sq) learners (42 percent global).