Learning Styles and Their Relationship with Educational Performance of Medical Students in an Outcome Based Integrated Curriculum

BACKGROUND Learning modality preference is one of various components of learning style. This study has been done among medical undergraduate students to explore their learning mode preference and its relation to academic performance. METHODS We studied learning style as Sensory Mode Preference (SMP) and preferred Teaching Learning Methodology (TLM) of 4th semester undergraduate medical students (n = 211; males = 168, females = 43) in Saudi Arabia. The validated VARK learning style questionnaire was used to determine SMP and standardized self-prepared questionnaire sheet was used to determine the most preferred TLM of students. We explored relationship between the determined sensory mode preferences of these students with their academic performance in the 2nd semester. RESULTS Multimodal VARK (Visual + Auditory + Read - Write + Kinaesthetic) was the most preferred (25.5 %) LMP. There was significant difference between perceived SMP of male and female students. Significant difference was also found between perceived and determined SMP of students. There was significant difference between male and female students for the most preferred TLM. There was no significant correlation between SMP and academic performance. CONCLUSIONS Multimodal LMP is more common than unimodal in this group of medical students. There is strong preference for TLM in which there is provision for different learning styles. Students are generally not aware of their own learning styles and so there should be investigation of learning style of each student and they should be encouraged to find out their learning styles. This will help them in learning and in enhancing their metacognition. In an integrated medical curriculum, which comprises of variety of active teaching learning methodologies, limitation of learning styles can be nullified.