Does Personal Learning Style Predict the Ability to Learn Laparoscopic Surgery? A Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Acquiring laparoscopic skills occurs at different rates among trainees. We conducted a pilot study to determine whether variation in laparoscopic skill acquisition was associated with subject's learning styles. Materials and Methods: Nineteen medical students performed 10 repetitions of the object transfer task over a period of 4 weeks using a validated laparoscopic simulator. The main exposure was participants' learning style categorized according to the Fleming VARK-learning style inventory. VARK (V = visual, A = aural, R = read/write, K = kinesthetic) is a validated learning style model that identifies four different learning styles. The main outcome measures that reflected laparoscopic skill acquisition were task completion time (<107 seconds) and total instrument distance (<2.03 m) obtained from SurgTrac® motion analysis software. To determine whether participants' laparoscopic proficiency was associated with learning style we used chi-square tests for categorical variables and t-tests for continuous variables. Results: Nineteen participants completed the inventory, 37% (7) were classified as kinesthetic and/or visual style learners, while 63% (12) were considered multimodal or reading/writing style learners. Participants classified as visual/kinesthetic were ∼4 years older than participants classified as multimodal or reading/writing style learners. No gender differences were observed between the groups. Eighty-five percent (6) of participants with a kinesthetic and/or visual learning style reached the proficiency level for task completion time while only 17% (2) of participants with multimodal or read/write learning style performed the task in <107 seconds (χ2 = 8.7; P = .003). Regarding total instrument distance, 85% (6) of participants classified as kinesthetic and/or visual learners and 67% (8) of participants classified as multimodal or read/write learners performed the task in <2.03 m (P = .36). Conclusions: This is the first study to investigate the correlation between trainees' VARK-learning style and their ability to acquire laparoscopic skills. This pilot study suggests that trainees' learning style may affect the ability to acquire laparoscopic skill proficiency. Larger studies are needed to confirm these preliminary observations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".