The study of architecture students' learning styles and their relationships with gender, academic performance, and duration of study in this discipline

The present paper focused on architecture students' learning styles based on Kolb's Experiential learning theory (ELT) and evaluated relationships between students' learning styles, degree of their academic achievement, gender, and duration of study in architecture. The present study aimed to see whether a dominant learning style can be outlined for architecture students in different studies on various disciplines. The present descriptive study was conducted according to a cross-sectional methodology in 2017. The statistical population included architecture students studying for BA courses at Babol Noshirvani University of Technology in Iran, among whom 85 students were selected as the sample. Kolb's learning style inventory (LSI) was used for data collection. Based on the results of this research, divergent, accommodating, assimilating and convergent styles were the architecture students' dominant learning styles, respectively. Furthermore, there was an unbalanced distribution of dispersed different learning styles as more than a half of the students' preferred divergent learning styles while divergent and accommodating styles in the half north of scatter plot generally covered more than 85% of the participants. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed between the students' mean scores of learning style test at the end of the first to fourth years of study. It was found that there were significant relationships between male students' learning styles and their achievement in architecture education. Accordingly, male students with divergent learning styles had higher academic achievement in terms of their total grade point average, compared to that of assimilating and accommodating groups. Finally, there was a significant relationship between the students' academic performance and gender. In general, female students had better performance in architecture in terms of their total grade point average.