The influence of learning styles on collaborative performances of allied health students in a clinical exercise

With the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary practice, there is a need to recognize factors that promote effective interdisciplinary teams. The influence of individual learning-style preference on collaborative performance was examined in 78 occupational and physical therapy students in a neuroscience course. They were randomly assigned in pairs to one of three subsets based upon their Kolb Learning Style Inventory scores (active experimenters vs reflective observers). The students viewed a videotape of a quadriplegic patient's physical examination and completed a collaborative exercise that required performance skills on all levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Analysis of variance revealed no significant difference among learning-style subset pairs in performance (F2, 36 = 0.43, p > 0.05), but the exercise's overall grade correlated with the average of the pair's highest individual scores on two prior written exams (r = 0.631, p < 0.05), suggesting that background knowledge may predict performance better than learning styles do. It is suggested that differences in information-processing styles as measured by the Kolb inventory do not affect interdisciplinary team performance.