The influence of learning styles preference of undergraduate nursing students on educational outcomes in substance use education

SummaryThis paper reports a study identifying the learning styles preference of undergraduate nursing students and examining its influence on educational outcomes. There are limited recent studies in the UK on the learning styles preference of undergraduate and its influence on educational outcomes. A purposive sample of 110 undergraduate nursing students completed a demographic questionnaire and the Honey and Mumford’s learning styles inventory. A pre-post-test design was used to evaluate the educational outcomes. Reflector learning styles preference was the dominant learning styles among the majority of undergraduate nursing students. An interesting phenomenon about the distribution of the learning styles preference is the additional “dual” learning style category. The hypothesis that learning styles preference will determine knowledge acquisition, changes in attitude and intervention confidence skills was rejected. However, as this is a multi-layered hypothesis the findings showed that only the dual learning styles preference group was found to have a significant influence in intervention confidence skills. Further research is warranted to replicate this study using the same methodology but with several different population samples specialising in different branch of nursing. As there are limited literature on the dual learning styles preferences, this dual preference phenomenon needs further investigation to establish its acceptability in nursing education.