Métodos de enseñanza y aprendizaje

LEARNING AND TEACHING STYLES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
[Engr. Education, 78(7), 674–681 (1988)] Author’s Preface — June 2002 by Richard M. Felder When Linda Silverman and I wrote this paper in 1987, our goal was to offer some insights about teaching and learning based on Dr. Silverman’s expertise in educational psychology and my experience in engineering education that would be helpful to some ofmy fellow engineering professors. When the paper was published early in 1988, the response was astonishing. Almost immediately, reprint requests flooded in from all over the world. The paper started to be cited in the engineering education literature, then in the general science education literature; it was the first article cited in the premier issue of ERIC’s National Teaching and LearningForum; and it was the most frequently cited paper in articles published in the Journal of Engineering Education over a 10-year period. A self-scoring web-based instrument called the Index of Learning Styles that assesses preferences on four scales of the learning style model developed in the paper currently gets about 100,000 hits a year and has been translated into half a dozen languages that I knowabout and probably more that I don’t, even though it has not yet been validated. The 1988 paper is still cited more than any other paper I have written, including more recent papers on learning styles. A problem is that in recent years I have found reasons to make two significant changes in the model: dropping the inductive/deductive dimension, and changing the visual/auditory category tovisual/verbal. (I will shortly explain both modifications.) When I set up my web site, I deliberately left the 1988 paper out of it, preferring that readers consult more recent articles on the subject that better reflected my current thinking. Since the paper seems to have acquired a life of its own, however, I decided to add it to the web site with this preface included to explain the changes. The paperis reproduced following the preface, unmodified from the original version except for changes in layout I made for reasons that would be known to anyone who has ever tried to scan a 3-column article with inserts and convert it into a Microsoft Word document. Deletion of the inductive/deductive dimension I have come to believe that while induction and deduction are indeed different learningpreferences and different teaching approaches, the “best” method of teaching—at least below the graduate school level—is induction, whether it be called problem-based learning, discovery learning, inquiry learning, or some variation on those themes. On the other hand, the traditional college teaching method is deduction, starting with "fundamentals" and proceeding to applications. The problem withinductive presentation is that it isn't concise and prescriptive—you have to take a thorny problem or a collection of observations or data and try to make sense of it. Many or most students would say that they prefer deductive presentation—“Just tell me exactly what I need to know for the test, not one word more or less.” (My speculation in the paper that more students would prefer induction was refutedby additional sampling.) I don't want

2 instructors to be able to determine somehow that their students prefer deductive presentation and use that result to justify continuing to use the traditional but less effective lecture paradigm in their courses and curricula. I have therefore omitted this dimension from the model. Change of the visual/auditory dimension to the visual/verbal dimension“Visual” information clearly includes pictures, diagrams, charts, plots, animations, etc., and “auditory” information clearly includes spoken words and other sounds. The one medium of information transmission that is not clear is written prose. It is perceived visually and so obviously cannot be categorized as auditory, but it is also a mistake to lump it into the visual category as though it were...