Sensing and Intuitive LearnersIn hi

Sensing and Intuitive Learners
In his theory of psychological types,
Carl Jung6 introduced sensing and
intuition as the two ways in which
people tend to perceive the world.
Sensing involves observing, gathering
data through the senses; intuition
involves indirect perception by way of
the unconscious—speculation, imagination,
hunches. Everyone uses both
faculties, but most people tend to favor
one over the other.
In the 1940s Isabel Briggs Myers
developed the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator (MBTI), an instrument that
measures, among other things, the
degree to which an individual prefers
sensing or intuition. In the succeeding
decades the MBTI has been given to
hundreds of thousands of people and
the resulting profiles have been
correlated with career preferences and
aptitudes, management styles, learning
styles, and various behavioral
tendencies. The characteristics of
intuitive and sensing types7 and the
different ways in which sensors and
intuitors approach learning1,2 have been
studied.
Sensors like facts, data, and experimentation;
intuitors prefer principles
and theories. Sensors like solving
problems by standard methods and
dislike “surprises”; intuitors like
innovation and dislike repetition.
Sensors are patient with detail but do
not like complications; intuitors are
bored by detail and welcome
complications. Sensors are good at
memorizing facts; intuitors are good at
grasping new concepts. Sensors are
careful but may be slow; intuitors are
quick but may be careless. These
characteristics are tendencies of the
two types, not invariable behavior
patterns: any individual—even a strong
sensor or intuitor—may manifest signs
of either type on any given occasion.
An important distinction is that
intuitors are more comfortable with
symbols than are sensors. Since words
are symbols, translating them into what
they represent comes naturally to
intuitors and is a struggle for sensors.
Sensors’ slowness in translating words
puts them at a disadvantage in timed
tests: since they may have to read
questions several times before
beginning to answer them, they
frequently run out of time. Intuitors
may also do poorly on timed tests but
for a different reason—their impatience
with details may induce them to
start answering questions before they
have read them thoroughly and to
make careless mistakes.
Most engineering courses other than
laboratories emphasize concepts rather
than facts and use primarily lectures
and readings (words, symbols) to
transmit information, and so favor
intuitive learners. Several studies show
that most professors are themselves
intuitors. On the other hand, the
majority of engineering students are
sensors,8-10 suggesting a serious
learning/teaching style mismatch in
most engineering courses. The
existence of the mismatch is
substantiated by Godleski,11,12 who
found that in both chemical and
electrical engineering courses intuitive
students almost invariably got higher
grades than sensing students. The one
exception was a senior course in
chemical process design and cost
estimation, which the author
characterizes as a “solid sensing
course” (i.e. one that involves facts
and repetitive calculations by welldefined
procedures as opposed to
many new ideas and abstract
concepts).
While sensors may not perform as
well as intuitors in school, both types
are capable of becoming fine engineers
and are essential to engineering
practice. Many engineering tasks
require the awareness of surroundings,
attentiveness to details, experimental
thoroughness, and practicality that are
the hallmarks of sensors; many other
tasks require the creativity, theoretical
ability, and talent at inspired
guesswork that characterize intuitors.
To be effective, engineering education
should reach both types, rather
than directing itself primarily to
intuitors. The material presented
should be a blend of concrete information
(facts, data, observable
phenomena) and abstract concepts
(principles, theories, mathematical
models). The two teaching styles that
correspond to the sensing and intuitive
learning styles are therefore called
concrete and abstract.*
Specific teaching methods that
effectively address the educational
* Concrete experience and abstract
conceptualization are two poles of a
learning style dimension in Kolb’s experiential
learning model7 that are
closely related to sensing and intuition.
needs of sensors and intuitors are
listed in the summary.
Visual and Auditory Learners
The ways people receive information
may be divided into three categories,
sometimes referred to as modalities:
visual—sights, pictures,
diagrams, symbols; auditory— sounds,
words; kinesthetic—taste, touch, and
smell. An extensive body of research
has established that most people learn
most effectively with one of the three
modalities and tend to miss or ignore
information presented in either of the
other two.13-17 There are thus visual,
auditory, and kinesthetic learners.*
Visual learners remember best what
they see: pictures, diagrams, flow
charts, time lines, films, demonstrations.
If something is simply
said to them they will probably forget
it. Auditory learners remember much
of what they hear and more of what
they hear and then say. They get a lot
out of discussion, prefer verbal
explanation to visual demonstration,
and learn effectively by explaining
things to others.
Most people of college age and
older are visual13,18 while most college
teaching is verbal—the information
presented is predominantly auditory
(lecturing) or a visual representation of
auditory information (words and
mathematical symbols written in texts
and handouts, on transparencies, or on
a chalkboard). A second learning/
teaching style mismatch thus exists,
* Visual and auditory learning both
have to do with the component of the
learning process in which information
is perceived, while kinesthetic learning
involves both information perception
(touching, tasting, smelling) and information
processing (moving,
relating, doing something active while
learning). As noted previously, the
perception-related aspects of
kinesthetic learning are at best
marginally relevant to engineering
education; accordingly, only visual
and auditory modalities are addressed
in this section. The processing components
of the kinesthetic modality are
included in the active/reflective learning
style category.