The Felder Silverman Learning Styles of Ergonomics Students

Traditionally engineering education is predominately verbal, but many students of engineering courses have a preference for visual instruction. Ergonomics as a discipline is underpinned with a mix of engineering, science and psychological fundamental concepts as a back bone to evaluation and design orientated practice in industry. But higher order learning is often not achieved, if at all, in the classroom environment. Alternatives approaches such as Problem Based Learning offers solutions to this problem but it is resource intensive and not suitable for distance and self directed learning. This presents the problem of informing instructional design for blended learning approaches targeting the acquisition of higher levels of learning specific to ergonomics skills. The paper presents results of an analysis of learning styles of ergonomics students studying full time at undergraduate level and separately a group of students studying part time in industry. The purpose of this work is to inform the structure and design of a training model for ergonomics instruction which meets the skills needs in industry while considering the preferential learning styles of the students.