Medical students' attitudes towards group and self-regulated learning
Antje Lumma-Sellenthin
Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden
Submitted: 12/09/2011; Accepted: 26/02/2012; Published: 15/03/2012
Int J Med Educ. 2012; 3:46-56; doi: 10.5116/ijme.4f4a.0435
© 2012 Antje Lumma-Sellenthin. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use of work provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Abstract
Objectives: The study is aimed at exploring the association between beginning students' attitudes towards group learning and their awareness of learning strategies, to demographic variables and their exposure to problem-based or mixed curricula.
Methods: The descriptive cross-sectional design included students (N = 351) from two medical schools with lecture-based and two with problem-based curricula from Germany and Sweden. Gender, age, personal and parents' practice experience within health care were assessed. A questionnaire was designed for measuring attitudes towards group and individual learning, awareness of learning strategies was assessed with the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. The t-test for independent groups was applied to compare dependent variables between personal factors, and multivariate statistics to compare medical schools.
Results: Students' personal work experience correlated with self-regulation (t[sub](333)[/sub] = -3.307; p = 0.001) and group learning experience (t[sub](341)[/sub] = -2.971; p = 0.003). Students from the German problem-based curriculum reported most experience with group learning (largest mean difference compared to the German lecture-based curriculum = 1.45 on a Likert scale from 1 to 7; SE = 0.181; p < 0.001), and were better at regulating their learning strategies than students from the Swedish lecture-based school (mean difference 0.18; SE = 0.181; p = 0.034).
Conclusions: Students' clinical experience seemed to benefit self-regulation skills. Problem-based teaching methods and early interprofessional education appear to be favorable learning conditions for the development of professional skills.