In past years, studies on engineering education revealed the learning styles of most engineering students and the teaching styles of many engineering professors were incompatible. The five well known learning style dimensions include: sensing/intuitive, visual/auditory, inductive/deductive, active/reflective, and global/sequential. These learning styles and their corresponding teaching styles are summarized in the table below.
According to Richard Felder from North Carolina State University and Linda Silverman from the Institute for the study of Advanced Development, most engineering students are visual, sensing, inductive, and active learners. Also, many of the creative students are global learners. However, most engineering education is auditory, intuitive, deductive, passive and sequential.