Abstract

BRITO-ORTA, Ma. Dolores  and  ESPINOSA-TANGUMA, Ricardo. Assessing the reliability of the Felder-Soloman Learning Styles Questionnaire when applied to medical students. Investigación educ. médica [online]. 2015, vol.4, n.13, pp.28-35. ISSN 2007-5057.

Introduction: The exponential growth of medical knowledge has been calling for a better training of students in a series of abilities such as creativity, critical thinking, group collaboration skills, and self learning skills. It is therefore important to generate varied and dynamical teaching strategies intended to make student learning easier and to promote the development of the required skills; identifying student learning preferences may facilitate these tasks. Objective: To assess the reliability of the Learning Styles Questionnaire developed by Felder and Soloman, to identify the learning styles of medical students attending the Human Physiology course at the School of Medicine, and to determine if there exist gender-related differences in their learning styles. Methods: This research was conducted in a group of second-year medical students attending the Gastrointestinal Physiology theory and laboratory sessions of the Human Physiology course during the 2009-2010, 2011-2012 y 2012-2013 school years. Felder and Soloman's questionnaire was applied to 459 students and it was answered completely by 265 students (126 women and 139 men). At the end, the reliability of the questionnaire was calculated. Results: The value of Cronbach's alpha for each of the four dimensions of Felder and Soloman's questionnaire was found to be between 0.38 and 0.61. The active, sensing, visual, and sequential learning styles were the predominant learning preferences of the students in our study. There were no significant differences in learning styles between genders. Conclusions: Our results support the reliability of the active-reflective and visual-verbal dimensions, but the sensing-intuitive and sequential-global dimensions require further assessment. Further studies using larger numbers of students to estimate the validity and reliability of the questionnaire are needed. Studies to show if there exists a positive relation between learning styles and teaching strategies are also recommended.

Keywords : Medical education; Physiology; Learning styles; Felder-Soloman.