Assessment of Learning Style Preferences Among Medical Students of Universities in Southwest Nigeria: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Identifying the learning style of medical students allows educational methods to be adapted to their learning style, leading to higher educational efficiency. This study aimed to assess the preferred learning styles of medical students at medical colleges in south-western Nigeria. Methods The study was a cross-sectional survey design carried out among six hundred and thirty-four 200–600 level medical and dental students in southwestern Nigeria. Data was collected using online and offline questionnaires. VARK was used as the study instrument, and data obtained were analyzed using SPSS version 25. Results The majority of participants preferred unimodal style 193(30.4%) while some preferred more than one learning style, bimodal 132(20.8%), trimodal 136(21.4%), and quadmodal 173(27.2%). Unimodal learning styles between both Genders show a preference for Aural in Females (31.1%), while Visual (28.6%) and Aural (28.6%) are equally distributed in Males. Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) respondents prefer the Kinesthetic learning style (50.0%), while University of Ibadan (UI) respondents prefer the Aural learning style (36.0%). Learning style shows no statistically significant relationship with age, gender, level and course of study. Conclusion Identifying students' learning style preferences is important to designing an effective educational curriculum. The individual characteristics, educational understanding, and methods/techniques that teachers consider during teaching also differ. Determining the methods and techniques to achieve the desired product level in education is essential in the learning/teaching process.