Learning Styles as a Tool for the Education of Chemicalengineers

Adaptive and flexible learning environments are expected to be a critical strategic option for the competitiveness ofeducational institutes in the 21stcentury. In a multicultural society, as that of the European Union, as well as in global(open) educational systems, students have different backgrounds, levels of motivation, attitudes about learning, as wellas preferences and approaches to studying. Therefore, there is a need for educators to identify the factors that supportthe shift from lecture-based teaching to active learning strategies with such variable class audiences. Oneof the mostcritical factors is the identification of the students’ learning styles.This paper focuses on research models of learning styles and comments on the necessity, importance, and some positiveand negative elements of various related approaches.In particular we assess the profile of a class of ChemicalEngineering students who formed our research case study, through a pilot application of one of the approaches. Ourtarget group was formed by the participants in the elective course “Topics of Information and Knowledge Society”,offered at the 2ndsemester of the undergraduate curriculum of the School of Chemical Engineering at the NationalTechnical University of Athens (NTUA).The ultimate purpose of the overall approach was to improve theteaching methodology, course material, andcommunication channels by indexing the students’learning styles in order for the course to be more interesting and usefulto them.