Preferential Learning of Students in a Post-Secondary Introductory Engineering Graphics Course: A Preliminary Study Focused on Students At-Risk

This study follows a thematic trend in research that gauges engineering graphics student preferences, abilities, and consequent approaches and curricular designs for instructors. Students' backgrounds, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are considered to directly affect learning in the classroom; therefore, research is needed as to how students learn in the content that we teach. This study used the VARK Questionnaire to identify the preferred learning approaches of students in an introductory engineering graphics class at a major university. The questionnaire indicates whether a person prefers one or multi-modal learning methods that include (V) visual, (A) aural, (R) read/write, and (K)kinesthetic. A demographic instrument was employed to gather data that assisted in classifying students as being at-risk of leaving college or not at-risk. The researchers used the Fisher exact test to analyze the collected data. The Fisher exact test is most commonly applied to evaluation of a hypothesis with data framed in a 2x2 contingency table where chi-square assumptions are not individually met.(1) The null hypotheses are evaluated based on the probability of determining a collection of "observed frequencies even more extreme" than the set summarized in the contingency tables (p.633).(1) Students who took the VARK Questionnaire (n=132) had an overall high preference of kinesthetic learning at 27.4% indicating this is how they prefer to learn, with visual (16.9%) being the least preferred learner preference. Forty-two of the participants were classified as at-risk and no significant difference was identified within each learner preference between at-risk and not at-risk groups. The findings from this preliminary study support previous research conducted in engineering design graphics courses at the high school level.(2) A major recommendation is to fully incorporate differentiated instructional methods and applications to promote learning in engineering graphics at the post-secondary level, not solely virtual modeling when teaching students how to visualize technical information.