LEARNING STYLES CAN HELP THE CREATION OF NEW LEARNING MATERIALS?

Introduction:
It is widely accepted that students employ varying approaches to learning. Considerable effort has been expended in the development of conceptual frameworks for describing and measuring student learning styles, preferences and approaches to knowledge acquisition.
Health students seems to be more vocational profile who we don´t know if is related to their learning preferences.
This paper proposes to investigate the learning style profile on Physiotherapy and Occupational therapy students like a method to create more effective learning materials.

Methods:
We used the learning styles inventory, who measures preference for each of three learning orientations (visual, auditive and tactile).

Participation was voluntary and students of physiotherapy and occupational therapy (n _ 108) were asked to complete the LSI at the beginning of their academical year. This instrument consists of 24, four-item sentence completion sets. Each item in a set corresponds to one of the three learning styles.

Results:
Final sample consist of 108 students, 58 % occupational therapist students and 42% physiotherapist students.
The students distribution in accord to gender was: 38,4% women and 61,6% men, and their age was 21,73 ± 3,49.
The general results on learning profile were:
Auditive: 30.2 %; Visual: 38.4 %; Tactile: 10.5 %; Visual and tactile: 2.3 %; Visual and auditive: 10.5%; Auditive and tactile: 3.5%.
The median scores on the different learning styles were:
Auditive. 28.418± 4.407, Visual 29.558 ± 3.644; Tactile: 25.802 ± 4.242

Conclusions:
These data shows that the preference learning style is visual, showing more prevalence and higher scores. But tactile modality shows higher scores than other researchers have reflected in another disciplines. This can be justified with the more tactile component in the curricula and in the professional development of physiotherapist and occupational therapist.
This research can be used for the development of new materials more adapted to the learning profile in the health science students.