Comparison between the Learning Style of Medical Freshmen and Fifth-year Students and its Relationship with their Educational Achievement

Students’ learning style, as one of the effective factors on learning and academic achievement, is always taken into consideration in a successful educational system. Identifying learners’ learning style would lead to selecting more appropriate teaching methods by teachers and learning styles by learners. Therefore, this study was aimed to identify medical students’ learning style and its relationship with their academic achievement. In this descriptive-analytic study, medical freshmen and fifth-year students of Tehran University of Medical Sciences participated by completing the standard questionnaire of Kolbs. The average of all students’ theoretical and practical exam scores together with the fifth-year students’ OSCE and pre-internship exam scores were considered as indices for academic achievement. The most common learning styles among the freshmen were convergent (50.3%) and assimilation (36.6%) whereas the fifth-year medical students mentioned convergent (69%) and accommodation (16.7%). There was a statistically significant difference between learning styles in both student groups (P=0.0001); convergent and accommodation learning styles were more common among fifth-year students compared with the freshmen while such a result was the inverse for divergent and assimilation learning styles. There was no significant difference between learning style and students’ academic achievement. As convergent learning style was considered to be the dominant one, and simulation, laboratory assignments and problem–based learning are the most suitable learning atmospheres, it is appreciated if educational planners prepare such environments.