Learning styles of design students and the relationship of academic performance and gender in design education
Introduction
In design studio, the knowledge acquired in various courses has to be integrated into the design process in order to find an optimal solution to the design problem. Schon, 1983, Schon, 1987 observed that learning in the studio developed through a process he called ‘reflection-in-action’, however, research oriented to design education has not flourish (Waks, 1999, Waks, 2001). Recently, design educators have started to explore the characteristics of learning styles of students that can be used for the enhancement of learning in design (Demirbas, 2001, Demirbas and Demirkan, 2003, Kvan and Yunyan, 2005, Uluoğlu, 2000). This literature suggests that design students should learn by experiencing, reflecting, thinking and doing in the process of finding solutions to assigned design problems. Therefore, design education can be considered as being in line with the Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) of Kolb (1984). This study aims to focus on learning in design education using Kolb's learning styles and explores the relationship between learning styles, gender and academic performance.
Section snippets
Design education
In design education, learning and teaching methods aim to balance the creative process with a critical awareness of more objective criteria in the development of a proposition. Each design outcome tends to be unique, non-repetitive and immanent in its conception and development. During a design project, the student transforms a field of inquiry into a proposition or scheme. The learning process is characterized by continual dialogue. Students learn from sharing information with one another and
Learning styles
Slaats, Lodewijks, and Van der Sanden (1999: 489) state that understanding the “learning styles of students has a wide range of possible applications in education” from classifying the learning preferences of students to detecting potential learning problems at an early stage in order to choose the appropriate teaching methods. Many studies of learning styles have been conducted in the field of higher education (Biggs, 2001, Busato et al., 2000, Coffield et al., 2004, Guild, 1994, Hartman, 1995
Relationship of learning style, gender and academic performance
Besides the research on ELT that has focused on the concept of learning style and using LSI to assess individual learning style, there are studies that are concentrated on the relationship between gender and learning style. Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) used gender in order to identify two epistemological orientations namely, connected knowing and separate knowing. They investigated a theoretical parallel between connected knowing and concrete experience (CE) as both emphasize
Research questions
Most of the recent studies on design education using ELT explored the effects of learning styles on the performance of design students with a cross sectional view. Also, these studies did not concentrate on the relationship between gender and learning style. Therefore, an experiment was designed to answer the following questions:
- 1.
What is the learning style distribution of freshman design students across three years?
- 2.
Are there any significant differences in the performance scores of design
Procedure
Firstly, the purpose of the study was to find out the distribution of the four original learning styles of freshman design students. Also the nine distinct styles (Abbey et al., 1985) were used to analyze the distribution of freshman design students. Secondly, it sought to determine if there was any relationship between gender and learning styles and performance scores of freshman design students. Since various courses in design education involve different learning activities, the performance
Learning styles of students
Using the results of the Learning Style Inventory, the distribution of the students according to the four learning styles was determined (Table 1). There was no significant difference between observed and expected frequency of the three different groups of freshman design students in their preferred learning style (χ2 = 9.64, df = 6, p = 0.141). The distribution of each group according to the learning styles is depicted in Fig. 3. Although there was no significant difference in all three
On distribution of learning styles
The Kolb's Learning Style Inventory test, one of the popular instruments for describing learning styles was used to determine which learning styles were predominant among freshman design students. By repeating the study on three different groups who are the design students from three successive academic years, it was found out that there was a specific distribution of learning styles for design students. Design students were found to be more concentrated in assimilating and converging groups.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof. Dr. Giray Berberoğlu for his valuable guidance to the idea of this research on learning styles and for his insightful comments on the design of the experiment and the earlier version of this paper.
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