engleski

Medical Students' Attitudes toward Implementation of Problem-based Learning: Do Attitudes Differ depending on Students' Age, Sex and Grade Point Average?

BACKGROUND: The introduction of problem-based learning (PBL), conducted on Occupational and Sports medicine (OSM) classes, was a part of the new approach to students’ education in academic year 2018-2019. All students in the class were solving team problems based on previously assigned individual tasks by looking for articles they were obligated to read at home. After solving problems in small groups, students presented findings to the class. SUMMARY OF WORK: After finishing OSM classes, 126 final year students (83 females and 43 males) of School of Medicine, University of Zagreb were surveyed by specially designed questionnaire for the purposes of this research. There were 26 questions divided in 3 parts considering students' attitudes toward efficiency of PBL (first part) ; toward own preparation and presentation (second part) and toward professor's work and received instructions (third part). For each part, received data and calculated scores were processed by nonparametric statistical tests afterwards. SUMMARY OF RESULTS: Response rate was 80.8%. On the scale 1-5, participants' grade point average (GPA) was 4.1±0.5. The age was 24.5±1.6 years. PBL was considered as a valuable teaching method among 91.9% of participants with 85.6% of them who considered PBL applicable to the OSM classes. Regarding the parts of the questionnaire, no significant differences were found between males and females, except third part where females had significantly higher score compared to males: median [IQR]=8.0 [7.0-9.0] vs. 7.0 [5.0-9.0] ; P=0.034. Among all participants, no significant relationship was found between any of three partial scores of the questionnaire, respectively, with age or GPA. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Since the PBL was implemented in the OSM classes for the first time, positive students' attitudes have been encouraging to continue with this way of teaching. Though females had more positive attitude toward professors' engagement, all participants, regardless of their GPA and age, have considered PBL as an efficient teaching method suitable for every medical student. TAKE HOME MESSAGES: PBL has been well accepted and appropriate teaching method for the final year medical students that indicates an importance of critical thinking and making decisions according to requirements of their future work.

medical students ; education ; problem-based learning

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