AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ LEARNING STYLES AND COGNITIVE MASTERY IN BUILDING CONSTRUCTION EDUCATION

Learning styles play an important role in learning process and teachers should not ignore the problem addressing it. For learners, understanding their learning style may sometimes have effected from their own reflection about their learning and at other times it will have come together in their good learning experiences with their awful ones. The levels of students’ think in learning also influenced by their learning styles. For school level the cognitive ability is related to their achievement in their academic performance. The cognitive element in school level is designed based on Bloom’s Taxonomy to measure the students’ achievement. This research conducted is to identify the differences between students’ learning styles and their cognitive mastery used Bloom’s Taxonomy and revised Taxonomy by Anderson and Krathwohl in Building Construction Course (BCC) of Vocational Schools (VS). The Felder and Silverman Learning Styles Model (FSLSM) and Index of Learning Styles (ILS) were used as the instrument in this study. One set of achievement test was developed based on both taxonomy concepts in Building Construction Subject (BCS). The aim of the research is to identify the differences between dimensions of learning styles in FSLSM with students’ cognitive mastery in BCS. Research involved 128 students from three VS in Malaysia. There are four dimensions of learning styles investigated concerning two type of learners in each dimension. A first dimension is processing represent the active and reflective learners, second is perception dimension correspond to sensing and intuitive learners, third dimension is input it is be visual and verbal learners and forth dimension is understanding represent for sequential and global learners. Cognitive elements used in this research are the ability of students to answer the questions in vocational elements in BCS which are knowledge, skills and problem solving. The achievement test developed used the subject specification and the level of difficulty in every element of BCS. The analysis used Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) to answer the research hypotheses. The results showed that processing, input and understanding dimensions are influenced the students’ mastery in cognitive learning in BCS while the perception dimension is not influenced the students’ mastery in cognitive learning in BCS. The details findings discussed the significant factors in each dimension and cognitive elements. In summary, the way students get the information in their learning is depended on how they prefer to learn. To know how they prefer to learn teachers should understand what type of learners that they had.