A Preliminary Study On The Relationships Between Learning Styles And Final Achievements Of Five-year Medical Undergraduates

Introduction"Learning style"was promosed in 1954 first by h.thelen who was an American scholar. Western educators and psychologists have many achievements in this field and it is paid close attention. Among many researchers, David Kolb's achievement is focused on more than others. In 1984, Kolb mentioned that Experience of Learning Theory include four modes:(1) Concrete Experience(CE) (2)Reflective Observation(RO) (3) Abstract Conceptualization AC) (4) Active Experimentation(AE). According to Kolb, these four learning modes form two independent dimensions: Concrete Experience (CE)-Abstract Conceptualization (AC) and Active Experimentation (AE)-Reflective Observation (RO). Thus, the two independent dimensions form four quadrants which reflect the four learning styles: Accommodator, Diverger, Assimilator, and Converger.The foreign scholars study deeply the relationships of learning styles and academic achievement and the result is that learning styles are closely associated with academic achievement. In this field, Dunn couples are paid much attention and they got the strong support of the U.S.education circles. Their study is applied in every schools and grades in America. In our country, the study about learning styles began in 1990s, much about the langurage learning, few about the medical education, even OSCE.Through the preliminary study on the relationships between the learning styles and Objective Structured Clinical Examination achievements of medical undergraduates, our purpose is to find the difference and the features of the four kinds of learning styles in order to provide the basis for teaching strategies so as to promote teaching effect and quality.Subjects and Methods353 clinical undergraduates in China Medical University are used as subjects. Among them,155 are male students and 198 are female students. The test was taken on the morning, on the afternoon or on the evening from May 11,2009 to May 22,2009 in the clinical training center of The First Hospital of China Medical University,10 students every team. In order to understand individual learner's differences in learning styles and hobbies in learning process, Kolb's Learning Style Inventory was administered to 353 students. All statistics and psychometrics analysis including descriptive statistics, variance analysis, correlation and regression analysis were done with SPSS 13.0 software.Results1,The basic situation of OSCEThe annual assessment reliability is 0.72. The average degree of difficulty is 0.83. The mean differentiation is 0.34. The test average is 30.5, standard deviation of 3.215.2,The distribution of learning stylesOf all subjects,40.1% preferred the assimilator style; 30.8% preferred converger style; 16.1% preferred diverger style; 13.0% preferred accommodator style. The distribution of learning styles between female and male students has no significant difference.Students in this study scored in the lower boundary of the 40-60% percentile for CE (24.5), and the upper boundary of the 60-80% percentile for AC (33.8); however, the AE (32.7) score fell in the boundary of the 60-80%, and the RO (29) score fell in the boundary of the 40-60%.There was a significant (P<0.05) relationship about the scores of physical content and physical skills, internal paper exam, surgical station, sugical history-taking, sugical skills, sugical paper exam and gynaecology physical skills among the four learning styles.There was a significant (p<0.05) correlation between learning styles and learning performance. The score in SP station had significant positive correlation with the CE score and negative correlation with the AC score; the score in non-SP station had significant positive correlation with the AC score; the score of history-taking strategies had significant positive correlation with CE score; the score of physical skills had significant positive correlation with the CE and AE scores; the the score of psychology station had significant positive correlation with the RO; the the score of psychology history-taking strategies had negative correlation with the AC score; the score of pedology history-taking had significant positive correlation with the AE; the score of sugical paper exam had significant positive correlation with the CE and RO but negative correlation with the AE; short station had significant positive correlation with the AC; CCS station had significant positive correlation with AC.Conclusion1,Medical undergraduates have better theoretical knowledge, but they are relatively lack of capability to solve problems.2,The feature of five-year clinical undergraduates in learning preferences:Students have a positive awareness of the practice and greater ability; Students have better ability to perceive the information, but have poor communication skills with people.3,The relationship between learning styles and achievements:divergers did worse than the others but accommodators and assimilators did better than the others; the students who have preference for AE and CE did better in history-taking, physical examination, communication with patients; the students who have preference for AC were poor in communication with patients, but did better in non-SP station.4,In the process of teaching medical students, we should create opportunity in communication and clinical practice for the students, explore Individualized Teaching, enable students to find their own way of learning so that we could improve the skills of the studens.