BACKGROUND: Health care educators account for variables affecting patient safety and are responsible for developing the highly complex process of education planning. Clinical judgement is a multidimensional process, which may be affected by learning styles. The aim was to explore three specific hypotheses to test correlations between nursing students’ team achievements in clinical judgement and emotional, sociological and physiological learning style preferences.

METHODS: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted with Swedish university nursing students in 2012-2013. Convenience sampling was used with 60 teams with 173 nursing students in the final semester of a three-year Bachelor of Science in nursing programme. Data collection included questionnaires of personal characteristics, learning style preferences, determined by the Dunn and Dunn Productivity Environmental Preference Survey, and videotaped complex nursing simulation scenarios. Comparison with Lasater Clinical Judgement Rubric and Non-parametric analyses were performed.

RESULTS: Three significant correlations were found between the team achievements and the students’ learning style preferences: significant negative correlation with ‘Structure’ and ‘Kinesthetic’ at the individual level, and positive correlation with the ‘Tactile’ variable. No significant correlations with students’ ‘Motivation’, ‘Persistence’, ‘Wish to learn alone’ and ‘Wish for an authoritative person present’ were seen.

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION: There were multiple complex interactions between the tested learning style preferences and the team achievements of clinical judgement in the simulation room, which provides important information for the becoming nurses. Several factors may have influenced the results that should be acknowledged when designing further research. We suggest conducting mixed methods to determine further relationships between team achievements, learning style preferences, cognitive learning outcomes and group processes.