Learning styles of medical students from a university in China

Abstract

Abstract Background: Investigating students’ learning styles can generate useful information that can improve the curriculum design. This study adopts diverse measures to identify the learning styles of the students, though, there is limited literature related to clinical medical students in China. Hence, we utilized Felder’s Index of Learning Styles to examine the learning style characteristics of clinical medical students at Inner Mongolia Minzu University.Methods: This cross-sectional study investigated clinical medicine students for their learning style preference and the difference across genders. This study also analyzed data collected from other published studies. A total of 411 students from medical school at Inner Mongolia Minzu University furnished the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire. The proposed questionnaire assesses the learning styles of students from four dimensions; namely visual-verbal learning; sequential-global learning; active-reflective leaning; and sensing-intuitive learning.Results: Analysis result shows that clinical medicine students choose to receive visual information (chose by 73.97% of the sample student) instead of verbal information. These students prioritize sensory information (67.15%) rather than intuitive information, and process reflective information (51.82%) rather than active information. They prefer to process information sequentially (59.85%) instead of globally. Our results also show that male students present a higher preference for an active learning style over a reflective learning style, while females seem to present a higher preference for a reflective learning style over an active learning style. These preferences varied between cohorts (gender), but the difference was not statistically significant. Compared to data collected from other published studies, sensing and visual are the most popular styles of learning adopted by medical science students; however, preferences in other dimensions vary by group.Conclusions: In general, the study findings conclude that Inner Mongolia Minzu University clinical medicine students prefer visual, sensing, and sequential learning styles. Gender has no significant effect on medical students' learning styles. Compared to data collected from other published studies, research consistently shows that sensing and visual are the most famous learning styles among medical students.