Comparison of learning styles of british and yemeni students

The Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge teaches students from a wide range of countries predominantly using problem based learning methods. The methods include short term industrial assignments and classroom activities that require a high level of engagement and active participation. While there are many benefits to this system there was also a concern that the methods might disadvantage students from countries where the teaching and learning were based on more traditional lecture based techniques. To investigate this a study was carried out to compare the preferred learning styles and culture of British and Yemeni students. These cultures were chosen both as being of interest to the authors and being thought to represent a significant cultural divide. A range of instruments were evaluated and it was decided to use the Felder-Silverman ILS to investigate learning styles and Hofstede?s cultural dimensions to examine culture. Since the Felder- Silverman ILS has been publish for a number of countries this enabled the authors to pose the following questions: 1. What are the learning style profiles of British and Yemeni engineering students 2. How do the learning styles of British and Yemeni students compare against each other 3. How do the learning styles of British and Yemeni students compare against those of other nation states 4. Can a relationship between specific cultures and specific learning styles be determined? The results suggest that engineering students possess Active, Sensing, Visual and Sequential learning styles across all the nations investigated. This supports the idea that there exists a typical learning style profile for engineering students. These finding suggest that it may be possible to develop a standardised pedagogy for engineering education. There was however significant differences in how strongly the three of the preferences were held. The visual preference was similar across all nations possibly because of the normalising effect of teaching though PowerPoint slides and standard computer packages