The Relationship between Educational Factors and Learning Styles of Agricultural Students at University of Tehran

Evaluating student's learning styles and understanding how they learn, and using the appropriate teaching methods in order to improve the quality of their learning is very important. The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between educational factors and learning styles of agricultural students at University of Tehran. Survey method was applied in this research. The statistical population in this applied research was 1300 agricultural students at this university from which 300 students were selected applying stratified sampling technique. A questionnaire, including personal and academic characteristics of the students and "Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire" were developed to collect data. The realibilty of Learning Style Questionnaire was approved by using VARK test. Validity and reliability of the other parts of the research instrument were confirmed based on the evaluation of a panel of experts and composite reliability, respectively. The findings of research indicated that most of the agricultural students had an active learning style in terms of processing dimension (60%), an intuitive learning style in terms of perception dimension (55%), verbal learning style in terms of presentation dimension (56.7%), and sequential learning style in terms of perspective/understanding dimension (58.3%). The results of Spearman correlation analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between active-reflective learning styles with handout and sensing-intuitive learning styles with textbook and combined educational resources respectively. Results of "Man-Whitney U" test revealed that there was no significance difference between learning styles of students in terms of gender and educational level.