Stress Level Assessment of Medical School Program and correlations between Learning Styles and Teaching Methodologies

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Stress is a psychological change that is becoming ever more frequent among medical school students than that of the general population, and these stress levels may affect academic performance. When the individual learning style does not fit into the method used by the student's university, the clash may become another stress factor. We evaluated preferred learning styles (Honey-Alonso Learning Styles Questionnaire) and stress levels (Lipp Inventory of Stress Symptoms for Adults) among medical students from two universities in the state of São Paulo that apply different teaching methods. The results showed that and the majority of the students were found to exhibit the reflexive learning style at both schools (60.4% at UNOESTE and 32.7% in FACERES) and high stress levels overall among the students (68.2% at UNOESTE and 74.0% at FACERES) in the resistance phase (81%), and there was a predominance of psychological symptoms of stress over physical symptoms at both universities (75.86% of students at UNOESTE and 86.48% at FACERES). Female students were found to exhibit higher stress levels than their male counterparts (72% and 55%, respectively). However, we didn´t find any statistical association between stress level and learning style. This is the first study to compare stress levels, learning styles, and teaching methodologies at two different medical schools.