Learning Styles in First Year Medical Students

Abstract

Many recent studies have revealed that important differences lie within the ways that individual students learn. Comparatively little is known, however, about the ways medical students learn and it is only in very recent years that attention has begun to be focussed on this particular group of students. How medical students learn may have special implications for teaching and learning in the medical curriculum, particularly in activating and sustaining motivation. This paper reports on a preliminary study to define a typology of learning styles in medical students at Aberdeen University by looking at approaches to study through Entwistle's Short Inventory of Approaches to Learning. The results show that medical students in Aberdeen tend to have higher scores than other students on all eight scales of the Inventory which describe approaches to learning, particularly those relating to Achieving (well-organised study methods, competitiveness and motivation to achieve); Meaning (deep level processing) and Prediction for Success.