Learning Styles and Problem Solving Skills of Turkish Prospective Teachers

Abstract

Global changes in educational discourse have an impact on educational systems, so teacher education programs need to be transformed to better train teachers and to contribute to their professional development. In this process learning styles and problem solving skills should be considered as individual differences which have an impact in transformative and lifelong learning. In this context, this study aims to investigate the learning styles and problem solving skills of individuals training to become teachers. All participants (N=887) are education students at a state university in Turkey. This study revealed that the converging learning style was the most common among our sample of teacher candidates. Additionally, the learning styles of our participants did not differ in accordance with gender or academic department and the problem solving scores of all participants fell within the intermediate level range. Within this intermediate range, however, students who possessed the converging learning style tended to have higher scores on the problem solving measure than students possessing the other learning styles