Assessment of learning style preferences of pharmacy students: Findings from public university of Malaysia

Abstract

Background: Student's learning style preference is an important consideration for effective and high quality teaching and learning process. Different teaching approaches may not suit students' preferences, hence, producing a gap between learning and delivery instructions. The aim of this study was to assess the learning style preferences among the first year pharmacy students of public sector university of Malaysia. Methods: A prospective cross sectional study was conducted during non-lecture hour using validated VAK (visual, aural, and kinaesthetic) questionnaire. After a brief description about the study, the questionnaire was distributed to investigate student's learning mode preferences. Results: A total of 118 responses were received, giving a response rate of 100%. Unimodal learning style was preferred by majority of the students (94.07%). Specifically, visual approach of learning was commonly reported by the participants (53.4%), followed by kinaesthetic mode (22.88%) and auditory mode (17.8%) respectively. Bimodal and tri-modal learning approach was preferred by 5.08% and 0.85% patients respectively. Gender, residency, number of siblings and parent's income did not influence learning preferences of pharmacy students indicating no significance association between the factors and learning styles of the students. Conclusion: The study concluded that teaching styles should be adapted to accommodate the preferences of learning styles among pharmacy students to improve the quality of the teaching and learning experiences of pharmacy students.

Learning Style Preferences of Undergraduate Pharmacy Students in a Malaysian Public University

“…6 To date, two studies have been conducted to determining the learning style preferences of undergraduate pharmacy students in Malaysia. 2,7 However, none of these studies used the Pharmacists' Inventory of Learning Style (PILS) tool, which was specifically developed and validated for pharmacy education. 8,9 PILS divided the learning styles of pharmacists into four groups: accommodator, assimilator, converger and diverger.…”

Advising Approach to Enhance Students' Performance Level in Higher Education Environments

“…In (Milicevic et al, 2011;Al-Saud, 2013;Elkalmi et al, 2015;Gurpinar et al, 2010;O'Mahony et al, 2016), they used the higher data set in order to reach accurate results. Milicevic et al (2011), introduced proposed recommendation module "Protus" which assist learners for programming tutoring system during determining learners' knowledge level and their interests automatically.…”

“…Al-Saud (2013), aimed to investigate three factors which included learning style preferences, gender and previous academic performance of students to improve students 'performance. Elkalmi et al (2015), aimed to enhance learning experiences and improve the quality teaching for pharmacy students at Malaysia University during integration between teaching styles and students' preference in learning styles. Gurpinar et al (2010), aimed to determine the suitable learning styles of medical students during measuring satisfaction factor for various education methods and academic achievement in them.…”

Combining Chalk Talk with PowerPoint to Increase In-class Student Engagement

“…31 Elkalmi et al used a VAK scale on pharmacy students, and reported a high majority of students to prefer the visual form of learning. 12 Skeptics suggest that while students may have a 'preference' for one form of learning, they have the ability to learn from all different mediums of instruction. 32 Regardless of the learning index used or results reported, there is growing agreement that teaching to a single learning style may not be best suited for all students, which has led to a call for diversity in instructional design in the classroom.…”

“…7 While the survey does not suggest hard and fast boundaries, it classifies visual learners to prefer diagrams, graphs and charts; aural learners to prefer lectures recordings, discussions, and seminars; reader/writer learners to prefer books, handouts, slides and notes; and kinesthetic learners to prefer real-life examples, models, demonstrations and physical activity. 8 Various studies have reported a wide range of learning styles within different cohorts of medical, dental, nursing and pharmacy students [9][10][11][12] and have found a significant number of students preferring a multimodal form of learning, which combines two or more learning preferences. These studies have implicated that redesigning traditional lectures to include additional teaching tools, which can target a larger variety of learning styles, can strengthen learning for students.…”