The effects of learning styles and gender on the academic performance of interior architecture students

Abstract

The study focuses on design education using ‘Index of Learning Style’ (ILS) and explores the effects of learning styles and gender on the performance scores of design students. The ILS is designed to assess preferences on four scales of a learning style model formulated by Felder and Silverman (1988). The findings indicated that the usual methods of interior architecture education address a well-balanced class position in active/reflective and sensing/intuitive scales, a moderate to strong preference in visual scale and a weak preference in global scale. Furthermore, in the two-way analysis significant effects were obtained between the individual interactions of active/reflective scale with the other three scales when the academic performance score was the dependent variable.