Learning styles and academic performance in students of the engineering facultyat the Continental University, 2011

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the relationship between Bárbara Sóloman learning styles (active-reflective, sensory-intuitive, visual-verbal, sequential-global) and the academic performance in students of the Engineering faculty at the Continental University from Huancayo. Methods: We used the correlational descriptive design, based on a no-probabilistic sample, with the sample size of 289 students of three professional academic schools of engineering, to which was applied the learning styles inventory by Barbara Sóloman. Results: 24.6% show a balanced state of the visual - verbal learning style, 49.1% have a moderated visual state; the 20.1% are visually very strong; 5.9% are verbal moderated and only 0.3% is very strong verbal. By contrasting the hypothesis test using the Chi square test and the Montecarlo method which value of p=0.042, where the value p<α therefore the null hyphotesis is rejected. Conclusions: In the engineering students exist a direct and positive relationship between the academic performance and the Visual-Verbal learning style and it´s not related whit Active-Reflective, sensory-Intuitive and Sequential-Global learning styles. In the students in the school of Civil Engineering we found positive association between academic performance and Visual-Verbal learning style. In the school of Systems and Informatic Engineering we reported association between academic performance and the Sensory-Intuitive learning style. But is not observed positive relationship between academic performance and the Active-Reflective, Sequential-Global style. In the students of the school of Environmental Engineering we didn´t find any relationship between the studied variables.