ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING STYLES OF UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL STUDENTS USING VARK QUESTIONNAIRE AND THE INFLUENCE OF SEX AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Background: Learning styles of students, the visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic questionnaire is a simple, freely available, easy to administer tool that encourages students to describe their behavior in a manner they can identify with and accept. Teachers can use this knowledge to facilitate student learning. Moreover, students themselves can use this knowledge to change their learning habits. In medical education, the emphasis on covering a fixed syllabus in a limited time period with the delivered lectures provided little scope for assessment of learning styles and modification of teaching styles.

Aim: The aim is to assess the learning styles of undergraduate medical students and the effect of preferred style on sex and academic performance of student.

Study Area: Questions of different types regarding the topic were asked from the 4th year students of Gujranwala Medical College.

Data Collection: Questionnaire based on 32 questions was given to 65 students of Gujranwala Medical College for the assessment and collection of results. Moreover, discussions were also carried out with students on learning styles and their influence on academic performance.

Results: Topic discussion and questionnaire response rate is 100%.  93% students were in favor of using different learning techniques definitely effect the academic achievement of student.  88% result shows that medical students use more than one learning style to perform academically well. 60% results show that male and female both perform well irrelevant of adopted learning style.

Conclusions: Our results show that majority of the medical students preferred quad-modal learning technique followed by unimodal, then bimodal and in last tri-modal. Aural mode of VARK learning style score high as compared to others. Furthermore, there is no correlation between sex and preferred learning style.  Both male and female perform academically well regardless of VARK style.

Keywords: VARK questionnaire, Learning styles, Modality, Undergraduate medical students, Academic performance.