Towards Better Understanding of Medical Students: Learning Styles of Preclinical and Clinical Medical Students.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Medical students represent a broad spectrum of diversity that presents a challenge for instructors to meet their educational needs. Four sensory modalities of learning have been described visual, auditory, read-write, and kinaesthetic (VARK). In order to strengthen students' non preferred learning styles, their preferred styles must be identified. This study aims at understanding the learning styles of medical students in order to develop appropriate learning approaches. Materials and methods: The English version of the VARK questionnaire was distributed to preclinical and clinical students. Students were classified into Uni-, Bi-, Tri- or Quadri-modal. Results: There were statistically significant differences between preclinical and clinical students in the means of different VARK styles. The Quadri-modal preference (VARK) was the most preferred followed by Kinaesthetic. The most common in bimodal was Auditory-Kinaesthetic while in tri-modal Auditory-Read-Kinaesthetic and Visual-Auditory-Kinaesthetic. There were statistically significant differences between Preclinical and Clinical students in (Visual-Read) preference and (Auditory-Read-Kinaesthetic) and (Visual-Auditory-Kinaesthetic) preferences. Conclusion: A hypothesis that medical students had higher preference for Kinaesthetic learning compared to average students, was confirmed in this study. Further studies are recommended to investigate the correlation between different learning styles and performance of students in different types of exams.