The Preferred Learning Styles of Clinical Medical Students at the Imo State University, Orlu, South East Nigeria
Jerome Emeka Azike *
Department of Surgery, Imo State University/Imo State University Teaching Hospital, Orlu, Nigeria.
Oguamanam Okezie Enwere
Department of Medicine, Imo State University/Imo State University Teaching Hospital, Orlu, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Students have preferences in the way they internalize information. The VARK – an acronym for Visual, Aural, Read/Write and Kinesthetic questionnaire, tests students choices for preferred mode of internalizing information. The VARK questionnaire were administered to 400 level and 600 level medical students, a total of 123 of them participated in the study. Majority of them 89.4% preferred the multimodal mode of information reception while 10.56% were unimodal. A further analysis of the multimodals showed that females generally were quadmodal in their preferred sensory reception while the males were mainly trimodal.
Overall, as regards individual VARK component, Kinesthetic was more common (29.8%) among males (31.6%) while Read/write was more common among the females (29.6%).
Keywords: VARK, visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic, learning styles, clinical medical students, sex differences in learning styles, medical education