Teaching and learning styles in engineering education

Engineering professors, like professors in every other field, have always experimented with innovative instructional methods, but even with all the experimentation nothing was done to link the innovations in teaching to learning theory. Scholarly approaches to marrying teaching methods by the professors to learning styles of the students have become common in the past decade. Since matching the teaching styles to the learning styles is the task of the professor and there is no one best learning style or one best teaching style, one has to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of both. A single teaching technique will not always appeal to all students. The challenge of engineering education is to make the scholarship of teaching and learning equal to the scholarship of discovery, integration, and application.