Thinking Styles, Learning Styles and their Relations to University Students’ Hemispheres

Abstract

The present study aimed at recognizing thinking and learning styles and their relations to the hemispheres of students at Taibah University in Medina, Saudi Arabia. The study sample consisted of 343 male and female students at the University of Taibah in the following fields (Arabic Language, English Language, Special Education, Art Education, Physical Education and Sports Sciences( and students' ages ranged. The mean ago of the sample was 21.11 and the standard deviation was 1.05. The researcher used the revised inventory of learning styles of Kolb and McCarthy )2005(, Sternberg and Wagner’s inventory of thinking styles )1991( and a scale of the two hemispheres. The study revealed the following results: The most common thinking style was the Legislative style, the least common style was the Global style, and the most common learning style was the Divergent style. The least common learning style among students was the Convergent style. There were no statistically significant differences between males and females on the patterns of hemispheres. The results also showed that there was no significant correlation between Divergent learning style and all of the thinking styles and that there was a significant correlation between the Inclusive learning style and both Internal and External thinking styles, while there was no correlation with the other styles. With respect to the hemispheres, results showed that there was a significant correlation between the right hemisphere and Oligarchic and Monarchic thinking styles, while there was no significant correlation between the left hemisphere and all thinking styles. Also, there was no significant correlation between all the learning styles and the right hemisphere, and there was also no significant correlation between all of the learning styles and the left hemisphere. With respect to discipline, the results showed that there were significant differences among students according to the Discipline variable on adaptive learning style, but there were no differences among them on the Divergent, Convergent and Inclusive learning styles.