Learning Style Preferences of First Year Students of Medical and Allied Sciences

Learning styles may be classified into four major sensory modalities – visual, auditory, read-write and kinesthetic, that one most prefers to use when internalizing information. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the preferred learning style modality and to assess whether there was any difference in the learning style preferences among medical and allied sciences students. Learning style preference was identified using the Visual-Aural-Read/Write-Kinesthetic (VARK) online inventory tool developed by Fleming. A total of 273 first-year students of various medical courses (medical, dental, nursing and physiotherapy) completed a questionnaire that consists of two sections: the first section of the questionnaire consists of the demographic profile, medical science stream and preferred sensory modality of instructions while the second section of the questionnaire composed of the 16 questions from the Fleming VARK inventory (7.1 version) and was used to determine students’ assessed sensory modality preferences. Students were classified as unimodal learners if they preferred only one sensory modality, bimodal learners if they chose two, and trimodal learners if they preferred three. The learning style of the students from various medical courses showed a statistically significant difference in Preferred (p<0.001) and VARK (p<0.0001) learning styles. Within the group, VARK's preferred sensory modality was kinesthetic in students of first-year medical and allied sciences. As per Preferred Sensory Mode, kinesthetic was the preferred mode in medical (p<0.163) and nursing (p<0.0001) while auditory in dental (p<0.001) and visual in physiotherapy (p=0.281) students, respectively. The most common pattern was bimodal learning in students of various medical courses and statistically significant in medical and nursing. Present findings suggest that kinesthetic was the preferred learning style by both Preferred Sensory Modality Preferences and the VARK inventory tool, and was found to be statistically significant among the students of medical and allied sciences. The most common pattern was bimodal learning, with two dominant styles. Understanding of learning preferences of the students will help in the development of the most effective teaching strategies and, additionally, help to overcome the tendency of many educators to treat students in the medical and allied sciences in a similar way, so improving student learning, retention, and motivation.