The sensory modality used for learning affects grades

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Learning Sciences
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Understanding student learning preferences is crucial for optimizing educational strategies.
• The VARK questionnaire is a widely used tool to assess sensory learning modalities: visual, aural, reading-writing, and kinesthetic.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between students' preferred sensory learning styles and their academic performance.
• To determine if learning style preferences influence performance on different question types (multiple-choice vs. arithmetic).

Main Methods:

• Administered a Spanish-translated VARK questionnaire to undergraduate students across three cohorts.
• Classified students into unimodal or multimodal learning styles based on VARK results.
• Assessed student performance on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and arithmetic-type questions.

Main Results:

• Unimodal students with a reading-writing preference significantly outperformed aural and kinesthetic unimodal students on arithmetic questions.
• Reading-writing unimodal students scored higher on arithmetic questions than reading-writing multimodal students.
• No significant differences in performance were found for MCQs across different learning styles or between unimodal and multimodal students.

Conclusions:

• Sensory learning style significantly impacts performance on arithmetic-type questions, particularly for reading-writing learners.
• Learning style preferences do not appear to influence performance on multiple-choice questions.
• Educational approaches may need to consider learning styles when designing assessments for quantitative tasks.