Teaching Physiology to Dental Students: Matching Teaching and Learning Styles in a South African Dental School

Abstract

This study compared the preference for learning styles of dental students in a small class in physiology at a South African university with the preference for teaching styles of the lecturers. It also analyzed and evaluated the teaching methods and aids the lecturers used. The study was done in the last teaching block of the year after students have been exposed to all the lecturing styles in the same premedical subject. Two separate questionnaires were used in the study in order to evaluate teaching methods and teaching media used by the lecturers and to measure the teaching methods and teaching media that students preferred. Through a critical analysis of the data, it was found that the students preferred cooperative and active teaching/learning experiences more than the lecturers are using them. The study emphasizes the importance of students being actively involved in the teaching-learning process through cooperative methods. This may enhance their ability to utilize cognitive skills such as creative thinking, interpretation, critical thinking, and problem-solving.Dr. Allers is Senior Lecturer,

Learning styles preferences and e-learning experience of undergraduate dental students

“…Many researchers 11,13,14,[19][20][21] have failed to consider the well-balanced category; they simply reported their results by combining the learning style preferences on each side of the four domain scales in a dichotomized way, reporting the results as "active" or "reflective" preferred learning styles, for example: ILS scores ranging from 3a to 3b indicate individuals who do not clearly demonstrate a distinct preference for either domain. Therefore, there may have been a bias in aforementioned studies, which makes it difficult to compare with our results.…”

“…This instrument is designed to measure learning styles, and it is widely used because of its ease in relation to obtaining, managing, and interpreting data. Several studies have applied Felder & Soloman's Index of Learning Style with dental, medical, nursing and pharmaceutical students in different countries 4,5,11,[13][14][15][19][20][21] . The ILS has shown an acceptable internal consistency and reliability, with Cronbach's alphas ranging from 0.68 to 0.86 17 .…”

“…lectures. Lecturing is basically a passive learning approach that stimulates rote memorization and notetaking as the principal methods of assimilating knowledge 16,21 . References to learning style applications may change if a student notices this as necessary for learning purposes.…”

“…Even though it is impossible to contemplate all learning styles simultaneously within a single class, teachers need to provide different learning strategies 21 . With recent advances in technology and access to electronic materials, blended learning, which combines e-learning with traditional face-to-face teaching methods, has been found to improve learning outcomes in areas such as prosthetic dentistry 1 , radiology 2 and histopathology 22 .…”

Student engagement in a compulsory introductory physiology course.

“…Therefore, we suggest that the SCEQ instrument is a useful tool to measure course engagement in this context. Novel teaching pedagogies in both the health science and physiology curricula which either match teaching methods with different learning styles (Allers 2010;Eagleton and Muller, 2011), or incorporate an active learning approach (Vanags et al, 2012;Wilke 2003) have been proposed (Ernst and Colthorpe, 2007;Higgins-Opitz and Tufts, 2010;Henige 2012). These new pedagogies are intended to improve student academic performance, however, we suggest that the impact of these novel teaching strategies on student engagement is also of considerable interest.…”