Sensory-Modality Preferences Among Undergraduate Medical Students at a North Indian Medical College: Implications for Online and Blended Teaching
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Background The abrupt shift to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic renewed interest in how individual learners prefer to absorb and process information. The visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic (VARK) model offers a simple, self-report description of a learner's sensory-modality preferences and can inform how teaching is delivered. Objective The objective of this study is to describe the VARK sensory-modality preferences of undergraduate bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery (MBBS) students at a North Indian medical college and explore whether these preferences differed by sex and MBBS batch. Materials and methods In this cross-sectional study, 298 undergraduate medical students completed version 8.01 of the 16-item VARK questionnaire. Responses were scored with the standard VARK algorithm, and students were classified as unimodal (single preference) or multimodal (bimodal, trimodal, or quadrimodal). Category proportions were compared between the sexes using the chi-square test or Fisher's exact test, with significance set at p<0.05. Results Overall, 154 students (51.7%) were multimodal and 144 (48.3%) were unimodal. Kinesthetic learning dominated the unimodal group, accounting for 112 students (77.8% of unimodal learners; 37.6% of the whole sample), whereas read/write was the least common single preference (five students; 1.7%). The most frequent bimodal, trimodal, and quadrimodal patterns were AK (42; 14.1%), VAK (23; 7.7%), and all-four VARK (60; 20.1%), respectively. Mean modality scores were highest for kinesthetic (9.03) and lowest for read/write (3.82). Female students showed a higher proportion of multimodal learners than male students (57.2% vs. 45.3%; Fisher's exact p=0.048), although the four-category distribution and mean modality scores did not differ significantly by sex. Conclusions Students at this college showed a near-even distribution between unimodal and multimodal sensory-modality preferences, with kinesthetic preference being the most common single-modality preference. These findings describe the sensory-modality preferences reported by the cohort but do not demonstrate that any particular teaching modality is superior or more effective. Further studies linking sensory-modality preferences with educational outcomes are needed.
Source: Cureus
Institutions: Christian Medical College, Jaipur National University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7214937712