How best to encourage this flexibility is yet to be determined. Developing the flexibility to respond productively to all sorts of instructional situations would be a laudable goal for medical students. It has been advocated that learners take a very flexible approach to instruction, so to optimize what they get out of each formal instructional situation that is useful in the long term, not just useful for coping with the instructional situation in the short-term. The best learning “style” for benefitting from instruction is to avoid depending upon any single style, or any style-like consistency in approach. Awareness of LSs can create a better learning environment by enabling students to use appropriate strategies. The teachers can help students to develop strategies for adapting to differing situations, especially when LSs do not fit to a task.
Studies have also shown that the most effective learners are able to adapt to the style which the learning situation requires.
However, individualization of instructional methods has not been shown to contribute significantly to learn outcomes. Much work has been done on studying the individual learning preferences and how instructional methods can be tailored to cater to the different styles. Read-write and kinesthetic learners who adopt a deep approach learning strategy perform better academically than do the auditory, visual learners who employ superficial study strategies. LSPs are significantly different in males and females. Recent research has made it fairly clear that different students have different LSs. These learning strategies can be broadly divided into self-regulated strategy in which the students perform most regulation activities themselves, externally regulated strategy in which the students let their learning process to be regulated by teachers/books or lack of regulation when students are unable to regulate their learning process by themselves and also experience insufficient support from external regulation as provided by teachers and learning environment. The quality of learning outcomes achieved is dependent to a considerable extent on the learning activities used by learners. Learning strategies are specific combinations or patterns of learning activities used during the learning process. Some examples of the VARK learning style preferences (LSPs) are: Visual (looking at and making pictures, animations, graphs, tables, etc.) aural (listening to and participating in speeches, discussions, and question answer sessions) read/write (reading and writing text associated with the textbook, class notes, laboratory reports, etc.) and kinesthetic (engaging in physical experiences, manipulating objects, etc., e.g. VARK is an acronym for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic. Many tools have been developed over time to understand how individuals learn such as the Vermunt's inventory, Kolbe learning style indicator, Meyer Brigg Indicator, Flemming's Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic (VARK) questionnaire, etc. Bruner have described how humans assimilate knowledge about the environment through four sensory modalities: Visual (observing pictures, symbols or diagrams), auditory (listening, discussing), visual/iconic (reading and writing), and kinesthetic (using tactile sensory abilities such as smell and touch). Learning styles (LSs) have been defined as the composite cognitive, affective, and physiological characteristics that are relatively stable indicators of how a learner perceives, interacts with and responds to the learning environment.
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