Preferred Learning Modalities Among First-Year Medical Students at a Private Medical College in Malaysia

Abstract

Knowledge of students’ learning style preference is important for the improvement of teaching–learning process. Four modalities [visual (V), aural (A), read/write (R) and kinaesthetic (K)] have been applied to distinguish the learning style preferences among individual. The aimed of this study was to determine the learning preference among the first-year medical students at Universiti Kuala Lumpur Royal College of Medicine Perak. The VARK questionnaire developed by Fleming was administered to 120 first-year medical students. Data was calculated and categorised into multimodal and unimodal. For multimodal category, data was further subcategorised into high and low learning preferences. The chi-square analysis was performed to determine the association between learning style preferences and gender. All first-year medical students preferred the multimodal learning style. Among all the learning modalities, the majority of them have high preference for the kinaesthetic modality. However, they appear to have low preferences in three other modalities. No significant association was seen between the learning style preference and gender (p > 0.05). The first-year medical students at Universiti Kuala Lumpur Royal College of Medicine Perak appear to be multimodal learners and they have the highest preference for the kinaesthetic learning style. Gender has no influence on the learning style preference.