Traditional teaching and training aims to develop a knowledge base, focusing on analytical and memorizing skills of the student. The approach of teaching from the perspective of the theory for a successful intelligence proposes the development of the students' expertise through a teaching that integrates and uses creative and practical skills along with analytical and memorizing skills, allowing the students to exploit their intellectual qualities, by offering multiple modalities of encoding information (analytical, creative and practical activities) that facilitate the retention of proposed materials. The style is considered as a preferred way of doing something that remains constant in time and along the variety of activities. The thinking style refers to the preference of the person to think about the material taught or learned – such as, for example, the way of the global approach, the way of evaluation, the way of going beyond appearances etc. The learning style includes the individual repertoire of learning strategies (behaviors, steps, operations, techniques which the student uses to facilitate the acquisition, the memorizing, the updating and the use of information) combined with the cognitive style (how the information is organized and represented). By identifying the preferred learning situations in the classroom activity, we tried to capture the students' preference for certain ways of encoding the information, using the information and evaluating their activity (analytical activities - focused on analyzing the provided information, evaluation of what is the subject of learning, explaining how things work; creative activities - focused on exploration and invention of new ways of solving various problems or situations, imagining scenarios in which acquired knowledge can be used or finding new uses; practical activities - centered on the encouragement to apply in the day to day activity the information received in the classroom, practical test of what is known in theory) (Palos, 2007). The aim of this study was to „capture the specific learning and thinking styles of students from different academic specializations”. The objectives of the study were: 1.to validate the questionnaire for identifying the preference for a learning situation starting from Sternberg's theory – that is to learn for successful intelligence; 2.to identify the students' preferences for certain learning situations (styles of teaching the contents), depending on the type of academic specialization; 3.to identify the learning and dispositional thinking styles preferred by students, depending on the type of academic specialization.

The study has been conducted on 150 students of the III and IV year of the Faculties of Automation and Computer Science, Economics and Psychology–from the University of Timisoara center (50 students from each university), age range 21-27 years, selected randomly. This surprised the differences depending on the academic specialization the students follow. Data were statistically processed with SPSS 15.00 and AMOS 4.0.The analysis tested the factorial structure of QPLS-IS. We tested the relations between this instrument and: SLT-DI, DECAS (Sava,2008), learning style (Honey and Mumford,1986). The instruments used in research were: 1.The questionnaire to identify the learning style (Honey and Mumford,1986); 2.The questionnaire to identify the dispositional thinking style (Pacini and Epstein,1999); 3. Questionnaire to identify preferred learning situations from a successful intelligence perspective–QPLS-IS (Palos and Maricuţoiu,2008); 4.DECAS (Sava,2008); 5. SLT-DI (Singer-Loomis Type Deployment Inventory, version 5.01, developed by Singer, Loomis, E.Kirkhart and L.Kirkhart).

The obtained information have been sumitted to a quantitative and qualitative interpretations in order to capture the preference for certain learning situations (structuring and teaching the contents), depending on the academic specialization. Being aware that the learning style is very important in building knowledge, identifying the style of thinking and the preference for certain learning situations of the students becomes very useful in designing an appropriate educational environment. The practical value of these results is reflected especially in structuring the materials and choosing the working methods according to the academic specialization, in order to maximum value the qualities of those involved in an educational activity.