GENDER, LEARNING STYLES AND PERFORMANCE OF 1ST YEAR ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS: FIRST STAGE OF A LONGITUDINAL STUDY

Student gender and learning styles have been discovered to sometimes impact on the performance of architecture students. Scholars also assert that learning styles of students may metamorphose as they progress in school of architecture. Using the Inventory of Learning styles (ILS) developed by Felder and Soloman (1993) and fifty (50) first year architecture students in a private university in Nigeria as a sample, the authors have embarked on a longitudinal study which seeks to investigate the relationship between the learning styles of students of architecture and their performance as they progress in their study of architecture. First, the ILS was administered to the students to determine their learning styles. The individual learning styles were then juxtaposed with the students' scores in the architecture courses offered in the first year as well as their overall semester performance scores. The results were analysed to determine how these varied by gender. This paper reports the findings for the first stage of the study.