Abstract: Objective To explore the effect of teaching strategies adjusted to medical students′ learning styles in medical informatics course. Methods From August 2022 to November 2023, an experimental control method was adopted to set 139 fourth-year pharmacy major students of the 2021 grade and 70 fourth-year pharmacy major students of the 2020 grade from Pharmaceutical School of Hainan Medical University as the experimental group and the control group, respectively. A learning style questionnaire was distributed to students in the experimental group, and teaching strategies adapted to various learning styles were designed and implemented. For the control group, their learning styles were not investigated, and traditional classroom instruction was adopted for teaching. The teaching effect was evaluated through the course performance of medical students in both groups. The relevant data were analyzed using the t-test. Results The proportion of students in the experimental group who scored above 90 for auditory learners was relatively high [26.5%(9/34)], while the proportion of intuitive learners scoring below 60 was also relatively high [11.5%(3/26)]. The assessment scores of the experimental group students were higher than those of the control (79.45±13.07 vs. 74.20±6.77), and the difference was statistically significant (P<0.001). Conclusions By applying teaching strategies based on learning styles in this course, although the proportion of individual types of learners with lower scores was relatively high, overall, the course performance of the experimental group was higher than that of the control group. This indicates that teaching strategies that adapt to different learning styles can effectively improve the teaching effect of medical informatics courses, and also highlights the importance of paying attention to individual differences and learning styles of medical students during teaching.

Key words: Medical informatics, Learning style, Teaching strategy, Blended teaching, Learned behavior