Learning Styles of Engineering Students: A Case of Islamic University of Technology

Abstract

Islamic University of Technology (IUT), admits students from various countries with a diverse educational background. There has also been an effort to recruit female students in the university since 2016/17 whose number increases year by year. This has brought up a further challenge for teachers adopting to various teaching methods that will suit the different learning styles of these students. In addition, IUT offers both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Courses at these levels are often taught by same teachers. This diversity of the programme offers teachers a challenge with whether to deploy the same method of teaching in both undergraduate and postgraduate. Therefore, this study aims to enhance the effectiveness of teaching-learning through exploring different learning styles and how they differ among undergraduates and postgraduate engineering students at IUT. A quantitative research approach was employed in conducting the study. The researcher adopted and customized the VARK questionnaire which was administered to 340 students to determine their preferred modes of learning. After analysis of the obtained raw data from the participants, the unimodal learning style was found to be dominant over the multimodal learning style. Among the unimodal learning style, kinesthetic was the most preferred mode of learning. The findings also revealed that there was a difference in learning style preference according to gender. The percentage of the kinesthetic scores was much higher in males than in the females whereas in the multimodal learning style, the percentage of the read/write-kinesthetic score was much higher in females than in the males. There was no significant difference found between the learning styles of the undergraduate and postgraduate students of IUT.