Identification of Medical Students' Learning Styles in Terms of Gender.

INTRODUCTION Every amazing human development in the modern world is resulted from learning; therefore, teaching and learning improvement are the bases of all activities. There is a wide-range of factors affecting learning and the identification of these factors is very important in fixing problems and deficiencies in educational systems. Among the factors contributing to academic achievement are the consideration of students' differences and identification of their learning styles. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to identify medical students' learning styles in terms of gender. METHODOLOGY This is a descriptive-analytical study that it conducted in 2015 on 360 students of Medical Sciences. The data collected through a two-part questionnaire consisting of questions about students' demographic characteristics and the validated VARK questionnaire to categorize their learning styles. Using the SPSS-19 software, the collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, Chi-square test and ANOVA. RESULTS The results showed that the mostly preferred learning style among medical students was the Read/Write style (48.3% of students at school of nursing, 56.7% of students at school of dentistry, 40% of students at school of medicine, 36.7% of students at school of paramedics, 53.3% of students at school of public health and 43.3% of students at school of rehabilitation). The results also showed no significant relationship between learning style and age (p=0.60), school (p=0.106) and gender (p=0.41). CONCLUSIONS The results of this study showed that there is no significant relationship between gender and learning style of medical students. Furthermore, the mostly preferred learning style of students at Zahedan University of Medical Sciences is the Read/Write style.