FACULTY LEARNING STYLE AND STUDENT SATISFACTION

Vincent E. Sollars*, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University, Huntington, WV, 25755 U.S.A

BACKGROUND: We make sense of the world by the use of specific mental qualities that affect the way we perceive and order the world around us, i.e. the way we learn. According to Dr. Anthony F. Gregorc, these mental qualities can be divided into four groups of concrete sequential, abstract sequential, abstract random, and concrete random. All people have the ability to learn by each of these four methods, but tend to favor one or two. The method a teacher prefers to learn by can heavily influence their teaching methods. When the teaching method best matches a student’s learning style, those students will tend to be better satisfied with that teacher. We will be testing the hypothesis that teachers with a learning style similar to that of medical students, concrete sequential, have higher student satisfaction scores.

METHODS: All faculty at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University were requested to complete a survey to determine their learning style. Linear regression analysis was performed to determine the degree of correlation and analysis of variance was used to determine significance of correlation of each learning style to overall student satisfaction as determined by teaching evaluations by the student population.

RESULTS: The survey for the faculty as a whole represents each learning style for each individual with a score. Higher scores in each category represent stronger preference. There is a favoring of sequential learning styles of both the abstract and concrete varieties in the faculty of our medical school. None of the learning styles showed a significant correlation with student evaluations. However, concrete sequential did show the best correlation with teaching evaluation using multiple linear regression analysis.

CONCLUSION: We were unable to offer statically significant results to support our hypothesis. However, it still represents the best-fit model when comparing teacher learning styles with student satisfaction. A larger sample size may be able to offer stronger support of our hypothesis.