The relationship between learning styles and achievement in calculus course for engineering students

Abstract

The researches that have been done recently indicated that individuals' ability to learn and interact might increase when the proper conditions are met that suitable for every single individual in terms of pace of comprehension and power of understanding. There are plenty of factors for formation of learning. One of the factors is the personal characteristic, which are resisted to change. Once you determined applying the proper way of teaching the students depending on their perceptions skills, it would simplify the process of selecting the appropriate teaching strategy. Therefore, the strategy selected through the students' characteristics of learning creates a strong influence over the students' performances at class. This fact aids to shift the importance towards to the students instead of the instructor and his/her routine teaching style. In this study it has been defined how the engineering students' learning styles are categorized. Moreover it has been examined that whether one or more learning styles are dominant among the group members or not. The purpose of this study is to raise the success level of the engineering students in calculus course which is an essential course in engineering education. Therefore it has been analyzed whether the success depends on the way of learning style or not. The data has been used in this paper is gathered from David Kolb's learning styles model and the students' grades in their calculus course. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to evaluate the relationship between learning style and success for calculus course in engineering programmers. Consequently; base on the findings, a significant difference has been found among students' learning styles and their performance on the calculus course. The results determined the discriminatory learning styles.