In med school, students’ perceptions matter
One of the keys to student success in medical school is a positive perception of the learning environment—it’s linked to academic performance as well as higher scores on the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). A new study has found that student perceptions aren’t shaped as much by individual student backgrounds as they are by campus cultures.
Evaluating campus perceptions
After just one year of medical school, a student’s perception about his or her learning environment is shaped by the culture at the campus where they are taking classes, according to a recent AMA-authored study in Academic Medicine.
Researchers asked more than 4,000 students from 28 medical schools to report the frequency of 17 aspects of the learning environment from the Medical School Learning Environment Survey (MSLES) on a scale from “never” to “very often” at the end of the first year of medical school. Among the items they ranked:
Students gather for informal activities.
Competition for grades is intense.
Students in school are distant from each other.
Faculty are reserved and distant with students.
Courses emphasize the interdependence of facts, concepts and principles.
The students’ demographic characteristics accounted for very little of the total variance in student perceptions, according to the paper, which came out of the AMA’s Learning Environment Study. The greater variation was between schools, a finding that suggests the campus cultu...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Troy Parks Source Type: news
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