Learning Styles and Mental Health in technological higher education students

Abstract

Introduction: Academic success turns out to be a life goal for many young people in technological higher education, where factors such as learning styles intervene, which facilitate the understanding of their cognitive, affective and physiological characteristics with which they perceive and respond to a learning scenario. On the other hand, mental health is conceived as fundamental for human well-being. Understanding these variables allows students and teachers to organize and plan an optimal teaching-learning process. Objectives: to identify the learning styles most used in the population; to establish the mental health scales by gender and to determine correlations between the variables under study. Methodology: a quantitative approach was used with a basic purpose to know the nature of the variables, the data source was from the field, with a non-experimental cross-sectional design, its scope was descriptive and correlational, an analytical method was established. Results: significant differences were found (p<0.05) in the use of learning styles between men and women in the Active-Reflective, Visual-Verbal and Sensory-Intuitive scales. Likewise, when analyzing mental health by gender, women presented a greater number of symptoms than men, thus, in the category “Somatic symptoms” a difference of 25.9 % to 9.8 % was found; in “Anxiety-Insomnia” from 31.3 to 17.4; in “Social dysfunction” from 17.2 % to 7.5 % and in “Depression” from 15.1 % to 9.1 %. It was further determined that “Active-Reflective” and “Sequential-Global” learning styles possessed a stronger negative correlation with mental health. Conclusions: Finally, it was concluded that the female population presents greater alteration in their mental health, probably influenced by learning styles.