Determining Students Preferred Learning Styles, Revisited as A Need of Today

Abstract

Objective: To determine the most preferred learning styles of the medical undergraduates and to emphasize upon its utility in student centered teaching. Study Design: Descriptive, cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: The study was carried at the Department of Biochemistry, Federal medical & Dental college from October to November 2019. Materials and Methods: The study was carried on 1st year MBBS students after the approval of institutional ethics committee. A total of 85 students participated in the study out of class of 100 students. The sampling was purposive. The VARK (Visual, auditory, read-write, & Kinesthetic) inventory Tool version 7.1 was used as a survey questionnaire to gather the data about the preferred learning styles by the students. The collected responses were documented as VARK scores which were analyzed by using SPSS version 21. The quantitative data was expressed as frequencies & percentages. Results: Out of 85 students who took part amongst 100, 29% were males while 71% were females. The mean age of participants was 18.3 years. About 63% students preferred multimodal learning style while among the students preferred unimodal learning style, the predominant learning style identified was kinesthetic (34%),followed by auditory (15%) and visual (12%) and lastly read-write (8%). Conclusion: The students prefer to use a combination of learning styles rather than sticking to one style predominantly. The cognizance of educators for learning styles of the students and planning of teaching activities accordingly optimizes their learning.

Keywords

• learning styles; teaching-learning methods; medical students