Learning style preferences among pre-clinical medical students

Generally, different students employ different learning styles during their studies and medical students are exposed to diverse methods of teaching. Therefore, understanding students' learning style preference is an important consideration for a high quality and effective teaching and learning process.The aim of the study was to study the variation of learning styles among pre-clinical medical students of SEGi University, Malaysia. A cross-sectional study was performed by using VARK (Visual, Audio, Reading and Kinaesthetic) questionnaire version 7.2 to assess the learning style preference of 98 (n=98) pre-clinical medical students in SEGi University. The questionnaire consists of 16 items which identify four different learning styles: visual, aural, reading/writing and kinesthetic. Descriptive statistics were used to identify the learning styles of students. 61 students preferred multimodal as their learning style, out of which 43 (70%) of them were female students and 18 (30%) were male students. 37 students preferred unimodal as their learning style out of which 22 (59%) of them were female students and 15 (41%) were male students. In addition, female students had more diverse preferences than male students by having 10 out of the other 11 possible combinations in multimodal learning style of preference, whereas the male students only had 5 out of the 11 combinations. In this study, there was no significant gender difference in the percentages of males and female students who preferred unimodal and multimodal styles of information presentation (P= 0.263; and #945;=0.05). To conclude, the majority of students of both genders had chosen quad-modal as their learning style preference. The results of this study can provide useful information for improving the quality of the teaching and learning experiences of students.