Abstract

Lecturing remains a popular and predominant teaching pedagogy in Higher Education Institutions and Tanzanian universities are no exception. However, due to increase in enrollments, lecturing encounters serious challenges as burgeoning diverse nature of students’ learning needs associated with physiological, psychological, professional and biographic factors. This study employed cross-sectional survey to investigate on undergraduate students’ learning styles and extent lecture pedagogy complements students’ learning needs in inclusive classes during lecture sessions. The study involved 206 undergraduate students to whom semi-structured questionnaires were administered. The quantitative data were analyzed by SPSS, while qualitative data were subjected to content analysis. The results show majority of undergraduate students were accommodators, preferring more to experiment with their concrete experiences. Furthermore, results show that there is significant difference across their academic year, subject major, working experience and students’ exceptionality. The study concludes that lecturing is but a part of teaching pedagogy which has to be flexible to suit the prevailing contexts of inclusive teaching and learning to entail students’ differences including academic year, subject major, work experience and exceptionality characteristics of students in lecture halls. The study recommends more studies on lecturing and learning styles to augment theory and practice of inclusive teaching in universities.

Key words: Experiential learning, inclusive class, Kolb’s theory, learning style, lecture.