Learning Styles of Dentistry Students

Background. A learning style or learning preference is the complex manner in which learners most efficiently gain the knowledge, process and store and recall what they learn. Many questionnaires estimating the learning styles have been worked out, and among them VARK questionnaire is often applied. Objectives. The aim of the study was to evaluate the learning styles of dental students. Material and Methods. 78 dental students were involved in the study. All students filled in the Polish version of VARK questionnaire anonymously and the data were evaluated with use of available on-line the VARK questionnaire. Results. Less than half of the subjects showed the unimodal learning style (36/78, 46.2%) and the remaining ones pointed at multimodal, out of which the most often tri-modal (17/78, 21.8%) and next quad-modal (14/78, 17.9% and bi-modal (11/78, 14.1%). Among the unimodal learning styles the most often (14/78, 18.0%) and the most seldom was the read/write (1/78, 1.3%) type. There were not statistically significant differences between frequency of unimodal and multimodal learning styles, kinesthetic way as well as between the particular types of multimodal ones. Conclusion. Evaluation of learning styles with use of the VARK questionnaire is the useful tool for the analysis of knowledge gathered by the students and the obtained data can be used by academic teacher in education process.