Examining Learning Styles with Gender Comparison Among Medical Students of a Saudi University

Different students use different learning styles and acquire knowledge from various sources during their medical college learning journey. Every student has a preference for a certain sensory mode to receive and process all acquired information. Identifying learning styles among different students can help students try to strengthen their preferred learning style and improve other nonpreferred learning styles. Our objective is to assess the preferred sensory modality and the learning preferences by utilizing the VARK questionnaire in medical faculty students at Imam Mohammed Bin Saud Islamic University (IMBSU) and the influence of gender and its relation to academic achievements.

A survey was distributed to medical students of IMBSU in Riyadh. VARK questionnaire was used to assess the learning preference. Other questions regarding demographic data were also included in the same questionnaire.

Of the 146 students, 113 students completed the questionnaire. Of them, 95 (84.1%) were males, and 18 (15.9%) were females. The multimodal learning style was preferred by 70% of the respondents, with the remaining 30% having a unimodal style preference. The aural (A) and the kinesthetic (K) styles were the most preferred unimodal styles. Overall, the most common style was the quad-modal (VARK type 2) style, with 21.20% having this preference.

No statistically significant differences were observed between male and female students concerning their learning preferences. The participants' preferred learning style or learning model was also observed to have no statistically significant impact on GPA and academic performance.