Association for Surgical EducationLearning style influences student examination performance
Section snippets
Methods
The Kolb LSI (1985) was administered to two consecutive classes of third-year medical students during the 1994–95 and 1995–96 academic years. Participation was voluntary and the Institutional Review Board waived informed consent after reviewing the study protocol. Students (n = 252) were asked to complete the LSI at the beginning of their third-year surgical clerkship. This instrument consists of 12, four-item sentence completion sets. Each item in a set corresponds to one of the four learning
Results
Of the 124 students in the 1994–95 cohort, 106 (85%) participated in the study by completing the LSI and providing identifying information. In the 1995–96 group, 121 out of 128 students (94%) participated. There were no significant differences between the classes in learning orientation or academic performance. Consequently, data from the two cohorts were combined. A comparison of respondents and nonrespondents (n = 25) revealed that the latter tended to score lower on the NBME subject
Comments
Learning styles were not uniformly distributed among the students participating in this study. A majority (45%) were convergers, followed by assimilators (26%), accommodators (21%), and divergers (8%). The relative absence of divergers in this study is similar to samples described by Baker et al5 and by Newland and Woelfl.3, 4 More recently, Davies et al14 surveyed students at Eastern Virginia Medical School and reported that 22% of the students in their sample were classified as divergers.
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