1Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Grant Government Medical College and J.J. Hospital, Byculla, Mumbai-8, Email: shrutirp@gmail.com
2Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Grant Government Medical College and J.J. Hospital, Byculla, Mumbai-8
3Professor and Hod, Department of Physiology, Grant Government Medical College and J.J. Hospital, Byculla, Mumbai-8
Online published on 21 September, 2015.
First year medical students have to incorporate vast amount of information. Learning is influenced by the mode of the input that has been presented to the students. Visual,auditory,reading/writing and kinesthetic are amongst the known modes of information presentation.
The present study was aimed at trying to understand the different learning preferences that medical students prefer to have and thereby, try and incorporate those learning preferences into teaching methods.
The present study was conducted on 120 first year medical students in the dept of physiology at grant govt. medical college Mumbai. Standard 16 question based VARK questionnaire was administered to the students and assessed to decipher their learning styles.
Analysis of the study revealed that only 34.17% preferred a single mode or uni-modal way of information presentation and 65.83% preferred multimodal learning methods. Out of the uni-modal learners, preference wise, 4.87% were visual,21.95% were auditory,12.19% were read/write and 60.97% were kinesthetic learners. Amongst the multimodal ones preference wise distribution was 26.58% for two modes(bimodal),20.25% for three modes(tri-modal), and 53.16% for all four modes(quad-modal).
knowing about learning preferences can thus enable the instructor to address this diversity of learning styles amongst students and develop appropriate learning approaches.
Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, Kinesthetic, uni-modal, bi-modal, tri-modal, quad-modal, multi-modal, learning styles, learning preferences
