A comparative study of student's thinking styles in different academic majors of Shiraz University

The results of some studies have shown that thinking styles or learning styles affect the learning quality more than the intelligence. Thinking style or the overlapping term, cognitive style refers to the individual learning preferences. Considering the fact that identifying learner's preferred methods has a significant role on the curriculum of academic courses, the aim of this study was to compare the thinking styles of male and female students of different academic majors. For this purpose, 350 students of humanities, sciences and engineering (188 male and 162 female) were selected randomly using multi-stage random cluster sampling method and asked to answer to Grasha and Richman thinking styles questionnaires. The reliability of the research instruments were confirmed by Cronbach's alpha coefficient and their validity was attested by factorial analysis. Multivariate analysis of variance was used for data analysis. The results indicated that students of sciences benefit from more responsible and collaborative thinking styles than students of humanities and engineering. The findings also revealed that male students use more independent and avoidant thinking styles than the females.