Association Between Lean Manufacturing Teaching Methods and Students’ Learning Preferences

As more companies embrace the concept of Lean Manufacturing (LM), universities should consider changing their curricula since there is a high likelihood that students will participate in some aspects of LM as they begin their professional careers. Thus, it is important to provide appropriate learning experiences to prepare students prior to LM. However, students may learn through several ways and teaching LM has proved to be extremely challenging, especially for engineering students who are not used to abstractions. This paper aims at examining the association between different LM teaching methods and students’ learning preferences to increase their performance in courses. To achieve that, 76 graduate students from Industrial Engineering, who participated in two LM courses with different teaching methods were assessed according to their learning preferences and performance. Each LM course had a specific teaching approach: (i) classroom lectures and exercises (classified as traditional teaching methods), and (ii) problem-based learning (PBL) in real-world problems from companies undergoing an LM implementation. From the eight hypotheses formulated for this study, our results verified four of them, being two for each LM teaching method applied. Further, the effect of the learning dimension “information perception” seems to be more extensive than the others, since students’ performance in both teaching methods is significantly associated with it. The mix between active learning methods and traditional teaching methods may facilitate dialogical learning, encouraging collaboration between students and facilitate the transfer of knowledge on LM.