Background: Each students has their own learning preferences. This learning preference plays an important role in their academic achievement because learning preferences help them to process information which will be received by them. The purpose of this study was to examine the distribution of learning preferences among the final year medical student and its relation to academic achievement in Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia.
Methods: A cross sectional study of final year medical students (n = 142) was performed. VARK Questionnaire version 7.1 was used to categorize students learning preferences. The questionnaire consists of 16 items which identify seven different groups of learning preferences: visual, aural, reading/writing, kinesthetic, bimodal, trimodal, and quadmodal. Descriptive statistics were used to identify the learning preferences of students and analytic study were used to identify its relation with academic achievement.
Results: The results showed that the majority of medical student in Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia prefers quadmodal (44,3%) as their learning preferences, followed by bimodal (14,8%), trimodal and kinesthetic (10,6%), aural (9,2%), visual (7,7%), and read/write (2,8%).
Conclusion: The results of this study show that learning preferences could affect students’ academic achievement. However, more study on this topic needs to be undertaken before the relation between learning preferences and academic achievement can be clearly understood. |