Learning style preferences and its association with academic achievement of medical students enrolled with new initiative medical education curriculum at Ambo University

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.