Assessment of Undergraduate Pharmacy Student Learning Styles Using the VARK Questionnaire

Abstract

Introduction: Many students struggle to recognise their own learning styles, which leads to poor academic achievement. Thus, this study aimed to determine the preferred learning styles of undergraduate pharmacy students at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Selangor Puncak Alam Campus. The correlation between the preferred learning style of pharmacy students and their gender, year of study, and academic performance was also investigated in this study. Methods: Respondents (N = 258) were recruited using simple random sampling from four cohort of pharmacy students. The learning style was evaluated by using a validated Visual, Aural, Reading/writing, and Kinesthetic (VARK) Questionnaire. Results: In this study, unimodal learning style was preferred by 65.1% of the respondents, with the remaining 34.9% having multimodal style preference. Kinesthetic (K) was the most preferred learning style (37.6%) while Reading/writing (R) was the least preferred method of learning (33.7%). The Chi-square test of independence revealed that there was a significant correlation between gender and the preferred learning style (p = 0.002). However, no correlation was observed in the preferred modality according to the year of study (p = 0.877) and academic performance (p = 0.989). Conclusion: In conclusion, the majority of our pharmacy students were unimodal learners, with the kinesthetic learning style being the most common and reading/writing being the least preferred. Our pharmacy students have also been discovered to be multimodal learners, which may be an important consideration for educators utilising a mixed teaching technique to support various learning styles.