Learning preferences of undergraduate medical students in a tertiary care teaching institution: A cross-sectional...

Learning preferences influence how students acquire and engage with knowledge. Understanding these preferences is important for aligning instructional strategies with learner needs in medical education. This study assessed the learning preferences of undergraduate medical students and evaluated their perceptions of existing teaching modalities.

A cross-sectional study was conducted on 395 undergraduate medical students from June 2025 to February 2026 (9 months) at a tertiary teaching institution. Learning preferences were assessed using the validated version 9.2 of visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic (VARK) questionnaire, which categorizes learners as unimodal (single learning modality), bimodal (two modalities), trimodal (three modalities), or quadmodal (all four modalities) based on their VARK scores. Perceptions on lectures, practical, and clinical teaching modalities were also assessed. Data analysis included descriptive statistics; test for statistical significance performed using Chi-square or Fisher's exact tests, as appropriate, at 5% significance level.

Unimodal learning preferences were observed in 50.1% of students, with kinesthetic learning being the most common (37.2%). For 49.9%, multimodal preferences were identified, with auditory-kinesthetic as the predominant combination (16.7%). Clinical teaching received the highest mean satisfaction score (6.99 ± 1.90), followed by practical sessions (6.77 ± 1.71), while lecture-based teaching received the lowest score (6.14 ± 1.75). No statistically significant association was observed between learning preferences and gender (P = 0.970), age (P = 0.426), or year of study (P = 0.068).

The predominance of kinesthetic and multimodal learning highlights the need for active, experiential, and blended teaching strategies in undergraduate medical education.