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Learning styles and personality types of computer science students at a South African university

Published: 25 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This research investigates the learning styles and personality types of Computer Science students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa using the Kolb Learning Style Inventory and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, respectively. Students were found to be predominantly abstract intheir learning, and they did not show strong preferences on the reflective/active dimension hence they had either a Converger or Assimilator learning style which is consistent with prior research. Across the three years of undergraduate study, learning styles became more balanced in terms of the reflective/activedimension. Students were predominantly ISTJ, ISFJ, ESTJ or ESFJ in their personality types showing a strong presence of the SJ temperament which is associated with organisation, planning and decision-making. This result is less consistent with prior research. There were no significant differences over the three years in personality type.

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      Published In

      cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
      ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 39, Issue 3
      Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE'07)
      September 2007
      366 pages
      ISSN:0097-8418
      DOI:10.1145/1269900
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        ITiCSE '07: Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
        June 2007
        386 pages
        ISBN:9781595936103
        DOI:10.1145/1268784
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 25 June 2007
      Published in SIGCSE Volume 39, Issue 3

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      1. learning style
      2. personality type

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      • (2024)Unraveling Challenges in Software Development EducationMachine Learning Methods in Systems10.1007/978-3-031-70595-3_39(383-390)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
      • (2018)How personality diversity influences team performance in student software engineering teams2018 Conference on Information Communications Technology and Society (ICTAS)10.1109/ICTAS.2018.8368749(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2018
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      • (2012)What students wantProceedings of the 12th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/2401796.2401811(118-125)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2012
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