Medical Student's Learning Styles in Birjand University of Medical Sciences

Learning and its improvement are the foundation of all activities in educational systems. One of the most important effective factors on students’ learning is their learning style. Being aware of the learning style used by students, help teachers to assist the students for a better use of different learning styles; On the other hand, teachers can change their own educational style according to the students’ learning style to reach maximum level of efficacy. This research was performed in order to identify medical students’ learning styles in 2007. In this descriptive study, a questionnaire including demographic questions and Kolb Learning Style Inventory was distributed amongst all medical students who were attending the first semester of 2007 in Birjand University of Medical Sciences. This tool allows classification of learning styles into 4 groups: converging, accommodating, assimilating, and diverging. Among 267 distributed questionnaires, 175 were filled by students. 68 percent of students were female, mean (±SD) age of the students was 22(±2.5) and their grade point average was 16.5(±1.5). The most prevalent learning style was converging (52%) followed by assimilating (28.6%), diverging (9.7%) and accommodating (9.7%). There was no significant relationship between learning style and age, sex, educational level, and grade point average. Considering that people with converging learning style are competent in solving problems, it necessitates that teachers at universities change their traditional methods into new ones like Problem Base Learning (PBL) and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) so that they help students learn immense medical information.