Effects of learning styles on engaging children in school projects

The importance of children s engagement in school projects has been widely acknowledged. Despite various initiatives and efforts promote it, the effectiveness of children s engagement has remained limited. Available evidence suggests that most prevailing participation methods, employed in school design projects, continue to exclude groups of children due to the disparity between built environment professionals methods of engagement and children s preferred way of interacting with information. The research sought to determine whether engagement methods could be more effective targeted by determining and incorporating children s learning styles preferences. There are a number of different learning styles models, but the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK) is the most widely used. However, VAK is generic and is not fully suitable for children. As a result a child friendly-customised VAK learning style preferences questionnaire was developed to classify children s learning preferences into three sensory modalities in a range of activities across the primary curriculum. 151 Key Stage 1 and 2 pupils from four primary schools in the UK participated in the study. The results revealed that preferences for engagement methods differed significantly between the three learning style modalities. The findings confirmed that understanding children s learning style preferences is an important consideration when deciding engagement methods for school projects.