THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LEARNING STYLES IN PHYSIOTHERAPY STUDENTS

Purpose: Individual multidimensional characteristics of each student should be investigated in order to understand the information acquisition and processing styles while determining and evaluating their subjective learning styles. Since being practice-based and multidisciplinary in nature, physiotherapy education involves different competencies and skills than other health professions. Therefore, it is far important to identify the learning styles of students. The aim of this study was to investigate learning styles of the physiotherapy students and so, developing recommendations for effective and efficient physiotherapy education. Method: Individual learning styles of 63 undergraduate level physiotherapy students were determined by using 44 variables of The Turkish Version of Learning Styles Questionnaire which was developed by Barbara A. Soloman and Richard M. Felder. In the survey, there are 11 variables in each of the four sub-parameters: processing knowledge (active-reflective), knowledge detection (sensing-intuitive), data input (visual-verbal), and knowledge comprehension (sequential-global). Results: In active/reflective category, 33.3% of the students were found to be extrovert-balanced and 31.7% introvert-balanced. In sensitive/intensive category, 44.4% of the students were found to be sensitive moderate. 39.7% of the students were found to be visual moderate. In sequential/global category 41.3% of the students were found to be sequential moderate. Discussion: Results of moderate and balanced preferences show that physiotherapy students can learn more easily if educational settings were made according to the preferences into four categories "reflective, sensitive, visual and sequential". In other words, physiotherapy education which is designed by taking these four dimensions (reflective, sensitive, visual and sequential) into consideration will be more significant for physiotherapy students.