Comparison Of Learning Styles Used By Clinical Faculty Of Hospital And General Practitioners For Their Professional Development

Abstract

Aims & Objectives: To compare the learning styles used by hospital clinical faculty and general practitioners for their professional development/ continued medical education.

Place and Duration of Study: This was a Comparative cross-sectional study carried out at Pakistan Kidney and Liver institute and research canter Lahore from October 2019 to November 2020.

Material & Methods: Total number of seventy-six medical professionals comprising thirty-eight members of clinical faculty and similar number of general practitioners were included in the study. Amongst these, 45 were males and 31 females’ Learning style questionnaire adopted from Honey and Mumford was distributed to all the participants. According to the learning styles they were grouped into Activists, reflectors, theorists and pragmatists with preference categorization of Very strong, strong, moderate, low and very low. Data was entered and analyzed usin SPSS version 22 Chi-square test was applied to see the significant difference in two groups and P value was calculated and value of less than 0.05 was considered significant.

Results: There were 45 males and 31 females with ratio of 1.45:1 .In general practitioners the strongest learning style was reflector, followed by theorist, activist and pragmatists.While in the clinical faculty the strongest preference was again for reflectors, followed by activists then theorists and finally pragmatists, the significant difference statistically was only seen in the moderate preference in activist group which was 0.038.

Conclusion: Reflector type of learning style based on pondering, experiencing and observing different perspectives was strongly observed in both genders of consultants and general practitioners. However, a moderate degree of activist type of learning style influenced by doing and feeling was also noted in the general practitioners. Further planning instructional strategy and assessment based on these learning styles could benefit the career growth of these two groups of health professionals.