Characteristics of Medical Students' Learning Styles and Their Relationships to GPA

Characteristics of Medical Students' Learning Styles and Their Relationships to GPA Mira Kim, PhD, Sowon Ahn1, PhD, Jungmo Lee2, PhD, Ducksun Ahn1, MD, Youngmee Lee1, MD Research Center of Applied Psychology, Sungkyunkwan University, Department of Psychology2, Sungkyunkwan University Department of Medical Education1, College of Medicine, Korea University Purpose: The present study examines the characteristics of medical students' learning styles and their relationships to the GPA. Methods: One hundred 2nd year medical students took the revised version of the Index of Learning Styles(ILS) by Felder-Silverman, which was computerized. The ILS classifies individual preferences for information processing into 16 categories based on four dichotomous dimension: active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, sequential/global, visual/verbal. The GPA from the previous semester was used. Results: The most frequent learning styles were reflective, sensing, sequential, and visual, covering 25% of the class. For the relationship with the GPA, we compared group means. The sensing students showed significantly higher grades than the intuitive students. Other than this result, there seemed to be no particular relationship between learning styles and GPA. This relationship should be further studied. Conclusions: In this study, medical students were categorized based on individual differences in information processing. Learning styles are expected to be helpful in designing effective learning strategies and thereby enhancing medical students' performance.