Differences in learning styles among college of applied medical science students in different specialties in king saud bin abdulaziz university for health sciences in riyadh using vark questionnaire

Introduction: A learning style is one of the features that differentiate the student’s performance. Many tools are existing in the literature that have been utilized to identify the students appropriate learning style. One of those is Visual Audio Reading/Writing Kinesthetic (VARK) questionnaire that used to identify student's learning style. However, there is no much data that examine the learning style among students in applied medical college. This study aimed to use the VARK questionnaire to identify students learning style at college of applied medical science.
Methods: 555 undergraduate students in College of Applied Medical Sciences (CAMS) at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University (KSAU-HS) in Riyadh were invited to fill out the questioner between September and November 2018. There were seven specialties within the CAMS College as follow: Respiratory Therapy, Emergency Medical Services, Occupational Therapy, Radiological Sciences, Clinical Laboratories, Anesthesia Technology, Cardiovascular Technology, and Clinical Nutrition. Total of 415 students (74.9%) completed the questionnaire successfully. A Chi-square test was used to examine the relation between the learning style and student score.
Results:135 students (33%) preferred to use the four learning styles. Students in this study preferred multimodal learning style (67%) compared to students who prefer unimodal learning style (33%). Among those students, (28%) were auditory learners, and (27%) were kinesthetic learners. Both auditory/kinesthetic and visual/kinesthetic were the dominant learning preference of among students with bimodal learning style. Among students who have trimodal learning style, (32%) preferred visual/ auditory/kinesthetic learning style.
Conclusion: According to our findings, it clearly shows that the quad -modal which indicates that using the four learning styles: visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic, is the most common learning style among CAMS students in KSAU-HS in Riyadh. Further study will be conducted to see the effect of changing the teaching methods in each specialty according to these results.