Evaluación de la fiabilidad del cuestionario sobre estilos de aprendizaje de Felder y Soloman en estudiantes de medicina

Abstract

Introduction: The exponential growth of medical knowledge has been calling for a better training of students in a series of abilities such as creativity, critical thinking, group collaboration skills, and self learning skills. It is therefore important to generate varied and dynamical teaching strategies intended to make student learning easier and to promote the development of the required skills; identifying student learning preferences may facilitate these tasks. Objective: To assess the reliability of the Learning Styles Questionnaire developed by Felder and Soloman, to identify the learning styles of medical students attending the Human Physiology course at the School of Medicine, and to determine if there exist gender-related differences in their learning styles. Methods: This research was conducted in a group of second-year medical students attending the Gastrointestinal Physiology theory and laboratory sessions of the Human Physiology course during the 2009-2010, 2011-2012 y 2012-2013 school years. Felder and Soloman's questionnaire was applied to 459 students and it was answered completely by 265 students (126 women and 139 men). At the end, the reliability of the questionnaire was calculated. Results: The value of Cronbach's alpha for each of the four dimensions of Felder and Soloman's questionnaire was found to be between 0.38 and 0.61. The active, sensing, visual, and sequential learning styles were the predominant learning preferences of the students in our study. There were no significant differences in learning styles between genders. Conclusions: Our results support the reliability of the active-reflective and visual-verbal dimensions, but the sensing-intuitive and sequential-global dimensions require further assessment. Further studies using larger numbers of students to estimate the validity and reliability of the questionnaire are needed. Studies to show if there exists a positive relation between learning styles and teaching strategies are also recommended.

Correlación entre los Estilos de Aprendizaje Según el Modelo de Felder-Silverman y el Rendimiento Académico de la Asignatura de Morfología y Función en Estudiantes Universitarios

“…Una puntuación de 9 a 11 puntos indica una preferencia predominante por una categoría de la escala, según lo planteado por Felder-Silverman. Dicho estudiante tendrá dificultades para aprender bajo métodos de enseñanza que no se relacionen con esa dimensión (Felder & Silverman, 1988;Felder & Spurlin, 2005;Brito-Orta & Espinosa-Tanguma, 2015).…”

Digital Educational Escape Room Analysis Using Learning Styles

“…In order to assess learning styles to each student, we employed Felder and Soloman questionnaire [14], a methodology that is currently used in other research [31,32]. The questionnaire consists of 44 questions with dichotomous answers ("a" or "b"), and considers four scales, one for each dimension of the Felder-Silverman model [13]: (1) Active-Reflective (how information is processed); (2) Sensing-Intuitive (type of information best perceived); (3) Visual-Verbal (how sensory information is perceived); and (4) Sequential-Global (progress towards comprehension of information).…”

Adaptation and validation of the Preferences of Learning Styles (Index of Learning Styles, ILS, 1997) questionnaire to the cultural and cognitive characteristics of Spanish students aged 11-15 years

“…Previous studied to validate the ILS questionnaire have covered adaptations to the structure of the questionnaire (Felder & Spurlin, 2005;Litzinger et al, 2007) or adaptations for other geographic settings or other types of participants (Brito-Orta & Espinosa-Taguma, 2015;Çardak & Selvi, 2016;Platsidou & Metallidou, 2009;Seneler & Petrie, 2018) and their subsequent validation. These works share the use of conventional factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha.…”