The relation of dental students’ learning styles to their satisfaction with traditional and inverted classroom models

BACKGROUND: The authors’ medical school has adopted an inverted classroom model (ICM) for physiology classes. This study aimed to determine students’ learning styles and investigate the relationship between learning style and satisfaction with different instruction approaches and components of the ICM. METHODS: One hundred and twenty-one second-year dental students participated in this study, which had a 77.6% participation rate. The Kolb Learning Style Inventory, a sociodemographic questionnaire, and a satisfaction survey were administered after course completion. RESULTS: In both the traditional and ICM classes, most of the participants were convergers (56.9 and 54%) and assimilators (20.7 and 25.4%), and the rest of the participants were accommodators (15.5 and 12.7%) and divergers (6.9 and 8%). Learning style did not influence participants’ satisfaction and did not predict their satisfaction with the traditional and ICM approaches. The satisfaction scores for the four components of the ICM were not significantly different by learning style. The mean satisfaction scores of the ICM approach were higher than those of the traditional approach in all learning style groups. All of the participants in the ICM class were more satisfied with the online and teacher-student interaction components than the student group discussion and presentation components. CONCLUSIONS: Learning style may not be a potential contributing factor for optimizing the implementation of the ICM. Instead of focusing on learning styles, further research must investigate how to design more efficient online courses, determine appropriate levels of learning materials, provide more online instructional interaction, and help students overcome their feelings of fear. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1749-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.