Abstract:
Background: How well a learner understands and retains information largely depends on whether
the information was received in the learners’ preferred learning modality. Even though learning
styles expected to influence the way students engage in the learning process and academic
achievement, there is limited evidence available in Ethiopia, particularly in medical education.
Objective: To assess whether learning style preferences affect the academic achievement of
medical students enrolled with new initiative medical education (NIME) curriculum at Ambo
University.
Methods: A cross-sectional study design was employed among 92 medical students. A standard
structured questionnaire of VARK (Visual, Aural, Read-Write, Kinesthetic) version 8.1 used to
assess the learning style preferences of medical students. The academic achievement obtained from
secondary source with grade record review. Descriptive and analytical statistics were used.
Kruskal–Wallis one way ANOVA and student t-test were employed to compare the academic
achievement with learning style preferences. Chi-square test was used to measure the association
between learning style and academic achievement. Pearson correlation was also computed to
compare the academic achievement with VARK score. P-value <0.05 was used as the cut of point
to determine the statistically significant difference or association.
Result: Medical students more preferred a unimodal learning style (58.7%), with kinesthetic being
the most preferred (61.11%). Of the 38 multimodal learning style preferences, 94.74% had
preferred a quad-modal (VARK). The VARK score had no statistically significant difference by
gender, age, or year of study (P value>0.05). The cumulative grade in both first- and second-year
results had no statistically significant difference by learning styles of medical students. But
kinesthetic learners had statistically nonsignificant higher median cumulative grade in both first
year (CGPA=3.21) and second year (CGPA=3.24) results. The kinesthetic score was also
positively correlated with the second-year cumulative grade, statistically significant (r=0.22, P
value=0.03).
Conclusions: The most common learning style among medical students was unimodal, kinesthetic
was the most preferred. There was no statistically significant cumulative grade achievement
difference by learning style preferences, but the kinesthetic score had statistically significant
positive correlation with second-year cumulative grade. Understanding learning styles is critical
for medical students and teachers when planning a learning and teaching strategy, respectively.
