Studying the Employment of Divergent and Convergent Learning Styles for Teacher Professional Development among Hamedan's Farhangian University Teacher Students

The research aims to comparatively study the learning styles of Hamedan's Farhangian University Teacher Students in order to improve the design of teacher professional development activities. To this end, a sample was randomly chosen from the male and female teacher students of Hamedan's Farhangian University (i.e., Shahid Bahonar and Shahid Maghsudi Branches). After the administration and data analysis of a standard test to recognize the subjects' convergent and divergent learning styles, three groups were identified to have convergent, divergent and intermediate thinking styles. Statistical results showed that the maximum, mean and minimum frequency belonged to convergent, divergent and intermediate learning styles, respectively. In addition, the findings indicate that the students of educational sciences were more creative and showed higher percentage of divergence in comparison to the students of other courses. It is also worthy of note that some suggestions regarding the variety of learning styles among students are proposed to design teacher professional development activities for teacher students.