Cargando…
First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course
BACKGROUND: Students commencing their medical training arrive with different educational backgrounds and a diverse range of learning experiences. Consequently, students would have developed preferred approaches to acquiring and processing information or learning style preferences. Understanding firs...
Autores principales: | , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2017
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5549383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28789690 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0965-5 |
_version_ | 1783255968083083264 |
---|---|
author | Hernández-Torrano, Daniel Ali, Syed Chan, Chee-Kai |
author_facet | Hernández-Torrano, Daniel Ali, Syed Chan, Chee-Kai |
author_sort | Hernández-Torrano, Daniel |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Students commencing their medical training arrive with different educational backgrounds and a diverse range of learning experiences. Consequently, students would have developed preferred approaches to acquiring and processing information or learning style preferences. Understanding first-year students’ learning style preferences is important to success in learning. However, little is understood about how learning styles impact learning and performance across different subjects within the medical curriculum. Greater understanding of the relationship between students’ learning style preferences and academic performance in specific medical subjects would be valuable. METHODS: This cross-sectional study examined the learning style preferences of first-year medical students and how they differ across gender. This research also analyzed the effect of learning styles on academic performance across different subjects within a medical education program in a Central Asian university. A total of 52 students (57.7% females) from two batches of first-year medical school completed the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire, which measures four dimensions of learning styles: sensing-intuitive; visual-verbal; active-reflective; sequential-global. RESULTS: First-year medical students reported preferences for visual (80.8%) and sequential (60.5%) learning styles, suggesting that these students preferred to learn through demonstrations and diagrams and in a linear and sequential way. Our results indicate that male medical students have higher preference for visual learning style over verbal, while females seemed to have a higher preference for sequential learning style over global. Significant associations were found between sensing-intuitive learning styles and performance in Genetics [β = −0.46, B = −0.44, p < 0.01] and Anatomy [β = −0.41, B = −0.61, p < 0.05] and between sequential-global styles and performance in Genetics [β = 0.36, B = 0.43, p < 0.05]. More specifically, sensing learners were more likely to perform better than intuitive learners in the two subjects and global learners were more likely to perform better than sequential learners in Genetics. CONCLUSION: This knowledge will be helpful to individual students to improve their performance in these subjects by adopting new sensing learning techniques. Instructors can also benefit by modifying and adapting more appropriate teaching approaches in these subjects. Future studies to validate this observation will be valuable. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5549383 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-55493832017-08-11 First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course Hernández-Torrano, Daniel Ali, Syed Chan, Chee-Kai BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: Students commencing their medical training arrive with different educational backgrounds and a diverse range of learning experiences. Consequently, students would have developed preferred approaches to acquiring and processing information or learning style preferences. Understanding first-year students’ learning style preferences is important to success in learning. However, little is understood about how learning styles impact learning and performance across different subjects within the medical curriculum. Greater understanding of the relationship between students’ learning style preferences and academic performance in specific medical subjects would be valuable. METHODS: This cross-sectional study examined the learning style preferences of first-year medical students and how they differ across gender. This research also analyzed the effect of learning styles on academic performance across different subjects within a medical education program in a Central Asian university. A total of 52 students (57.7% females) from two batches of first-year medical school completed the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire, which measures four dimensions of learning styles: sensing-intuitive; visual-verbal; active-reflective; sequential-global. RESULTS: First-year medical students reported preferences for visual (80.8%) and sequential (60.5%) learning styles, suggesting that these students preferred to learn through demonstrations and diagrams and in a linear and sequential way. Our results indicate that male medical students have higher preference for visual learning style over verbal, while females seemed to have a higher preference for sequential learning style over global. Significant associations were found between sensing-intuitive learning styles and performance in Genetics [β = −0.46, B = −0.44, p < 0.01] and Anatomy [β = −0.41, B = −0.61, p < 0.05] and between sequential-global styles and performance in Genetics [β = 0.36, B = 0.43, p < 0.05]. More specifically, sensing learners were more likely to perform better than intuitive learners in the two subjects and global learners were more likely to perform better than sequential learners in Genetics. CONCLUSION: This knowledge will be helpful to individual students to improve their performance in these subjects by adopting new sensing learning techniques. Instructors can also benefit by modifying and adapting more appropriate teaching approaches in these subjects. Future studies to validate this observation will be valuable. BioMed Central 2017-08-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5549383/ /pubmed/28789690 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0965-5 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Hernández-Torrano, Daniel Ali, Syed Chan, Chee-Kai First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title | First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title_full | First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title_fullStr | First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title_full_unstemmed | First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title_short | First year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
title_sort | first year medical students’ learning style preferences and their correlation with performance in different subjects within the medical course |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5549383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28789690 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0965-5 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT hernandeztorranodaniel firstyearmedicalstudentslearningstylepreferencesandtheircorrelationwithperformanceindifferentsubjectswithinthemedicalcourse AT alisyed firstyearmedicalstudentslearningstylepreferencesandtheircorrelationwithperformanceindifferentsubjectswithinthemedicalcourse AT chancheekai firstyearmedicalstudentslearningstylepreferencesandtheircorrelationwithperformanceindifferentsubjectswithinthemedicalcourse |