The challenge for an educator in a hospital is to provide for the learning needs of a diverse group of practitioners within the hospital that includes nurses who range in experience from advanced beginners to clinical experts. The purpose of this research project was to explore, describe, and compare learning styles and preferences of nurses in two areas of nursing practice: critical care and medical-surgical care. There are multiple facets of learning styles that can be assessed and applied to learning situations. Identifying learning styles may be beneficial to the nurse in order to assist with directing one's own learning but the research did not demonstrate a correlation between learning style, learning preferences or learning outcomes. This study included 107 nurses from critical care and medical-surgical care units at a hospital in western North Carolina. Participants completed the VAK learning styles inventory and selected from list three preferred learning methods. The majority demonstrated a preference for visual learning. Nurses from both practice areas chose skills demonstration as the most preferred learning method. This study failed to demonstrate any links or patterns associated with learning style and learning preferences for education methods for hospital specific education.

Because students learn in different ways, teachers adapt curricula to diverse learning styles. This book presents state-of-the-art research and information on how to use learning-style based instruction in teaching and professional development for nurse and allied health educators.

The decline in the performance of nursing schools poses a challenge among nurse educators to address this issue through improving the nursing curricula. This study aimed to determine if matching preferred learning styles with VARK-based teaching methodologies would enhance test performance of senior nursing students. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was utilized in this study. Two groups were randomly assigned to experimental (71) and control (88) groups and were categorized as to visual, aural, read/write and kinesthetic after completion of the VARK tool. The experimental group was subjected to teaching methodologies as to visual, aural, read/write and kinesthetic mode of instruction based on their identified learning style preference while the control group was subjected to didactic teaching methodology. The researcher made use of the two research instruments: the VARK tool which was used to identify the learning style profile of the subjects and the researcher developed multiple-choice exam. The research questionnaires and interventions were validated and pilot tested. Data analyses made use of percentage, means, standard deviation, paired t-test and independent t-test analysis. Processing of raw data was done using SPPS version 18. Findings revealed that there is a significant difference in the test performance of both the experimental and control groups before and after exposure to their specific teaching methodologies. Furthermore, a significant difference exists in the test performance between the experimental and control groups after exposure to their specific teaching methodologies (a = .002). It is concluded that matching the preferred learning styles with VARK-based teaching methodolgies enhanced the teat performance of the subjects.