Learning Styles and Teaching Models in Engineering Education

Students differ from one another in a wide variety of ways. Students have different levels of motivation, different attitudes about learning. Students have different approaches to learning and different intellectual levels. They also have different learning styles, which are characteristic ways of taking in and processing information. The differencies may have been classified into four categories under the concepts of cognitive strategy and cognitive style, learning strategy and learning style. Instructors have to take these individual properties of students into account, while deciding the type of instruction and preparing the teaching scenarios. To improve skill development in engineering education, instruction should be designed to meet the learning styles of students. Several learning style models have been developed, but a few of them were been the subject of studies in the engineering education literature. According to the Felder-Silverman model, a student's learning style may be defined in four dimensions; i)sensing or intuitive, ii)visual or verbal, iii)active or reflective, iv)sequential or global. The Index of Learning Styles (ILS) has been designed as a tool to assess the preferences on this four dimensions. The ILSQ is a questionnaire with forty-four questions. In this study, the ILS is performed in three different courses in the Geomatic Engineering program at the Istanbul Technical University, Department of Geodesy and Photogrammetry. The results are evaluated with student profiles. Teaching techniques used in those courses are overviewed and reconfigured in order the student's learning styles. Afterwards, the performance of the courses are interpreted with final grades.