Learning behind glass walls: learning style and partition-room, is there a correlation?

Purpose This study aims to investigate how a very particular learning environment, namely, partition rooms, affect students’ teaching experience and further explore if students’ learning styles is a pertinent determinant. Partition rooms are very common in Saudi Arabia when lectures are held by male instructors for female students. The male instructor delivers his lesson behind a glass wall, creating an environment of limited visual and auditory interaction. Various digital tools are present, meant to overcome the gap caused by the lack of direct student–teacher contact. Design/methodology/approach The researchers collected data from a sample of 109 female students who are studying at Level 4 Computer Science Department, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, at a public university in Saudi Arabia. All of them experienced a minimum of two courses undertaken in a partition room. The survey consists of two parts with a total of 53 questions. The first 20 questions were adopted from the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire (PLSP). Findings Research findings reveal that students are affected differently by the various dimensions of the partition room depending on their learning style. Originality/value There are fewer results in the literature that study learners of our particular group, namely, Saudi females. The study focuses on students studying IT and related fields. This study is almost unique, as most studies of the kind are related to the experience of females learning English as a foreign language. Therefore, the authors’ research gives much-needed insight into the conditions and perceptions of female students studying toward their degree in a technical field.