What styles do students of medical sciences use to learn? Systematic review and meta-analysis

According to numerous research related to learning styles and also the difference of these styles in students, this study was designed in order to determine the status of learning styles in medical students in Iran.

This study was conducted as a systematic review and meta-analysis. Searching for articles in this study was done from September 24 to October 15, 2022 in databases: Proquest, PubMed, Iran medex, Scopus, Sid, Magiran, Google Scholar, Eric and medical education journals. The research environment of Iran has been Mashhad. Using the PICOTS model, the keywords: learning styles, clubs, medical students were used to search the mentioned databases. OR, AND operators and possible combinations of keywords were used when searching for articles in databases. The extracted articles were first evaluated in terms of the research title, then the abstract of the article, and finally the text of the article using the "PRISMA Checklist". In each stage, repetitive articles and articles that did not mention the percentage of learning styles were excluded from the study, and the articles that met the inclusion criteria were stored in the (EndNote software, version 20, Clarivate, USA), and at the end, 53 articles were analyzed.

The results of the study showed that the most used learning styles among students of medical sciences in Iran was convergent learning style (32% with 95% confidence interval). In the investigation of the adaptive learning style in the fields of basic sciences during the years 2006 to 2021, the percentage of using this style increased and this trend was statistically significant (P=0.0078).

According to the findings of the study, the most used learning style in medical sciences in Iran is convergent learning style, and considering the characteristics of convergent people, it is necessary to provide effective and efficient training in medical sciences to Students' learning styles should be given special attention so that training can be guided based on their learning styles.