Journal of Research in Medical Education & Ethics

Different students have different learning style. Identifying the appropriate learning styles helps in improving the education.

The current study was done to determine the learning style preferences among the first year MBBS students and also to determine the association between different learning styles and the academic performance of the students.

This is a descriptive study, conducted on first year MBBS students studying in our institute, using the Fleming's [Visual (V), Aural (A), Read/Write (R) and Kinesthetic (K) (VARK)] learning styles questionnaire. The data was analysed using the statistical analysis such as SPSS, version 22, using the Chi-squared test and the t-test.

Of the 141 participants who responded to the questionnaire, 76% preferred the single modal learning styles, 46% preferred Kinesthetic and 34% preferred aural. There was no significant difference observed between the learning styles among males and females (P> 0.05). In addition, there was no significant difference between the VARK scores and their academic performance except for auditory mode learning (P= 0.018) and read mode learning (P= 0.02).

The majority of the students preferred single modal learning style as compared with the multimodal learning styles. In addition, there were no significant differences in the preferred learning styles between male and female students, and also no difference observed between their learning styles and academic performance.