Technicians and their learning styles preferences and cognitive processes of formal inferences

Abstract

During the last seven years several Argentinian national universities have offered (as part of their academic studies and programs) different undergraduate degrees under the denomination of technical degrees. The personal characteristics of their students are radically different from the traditional academic offer. Students learn by practicing and they comprehend information best by actively doing something with the information. We ran an experiment with students of a technical degree of web development in a course of Programming Introduction using Python. Preliminary findings revealed that their learning styles are mainly active and visual, and learners who are more verbal or have stronger concrete experience obtained higher scores in their tests. They perceive that inductive tasks are easier than deductive and abductive tasks. We also found that those subjects who are more efficient in solving formal inference tasks obtained higher qualifications in their exams. The findings can be useful not only for didactic transposition in teaching courses which take into account the balance of the students' preference but also to develop new instructional methods and software which focus on the cognitive preferences and cognitive process of technicians.