Adoption of dundee dreem questionnaire to assess the educational environment of an agriculture degree programme

Abstract

Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) is widely used in medical education institutions to assess students’ perception on the educational environment. The present study used a modified version of the DREEM questionnaire to assess the education environment of a BSc (Agriculture) degree programme in Sri Lanka. Students’ agreement on each of the 50 statements of five domains; students’ perception of learning (SPL) and teachers (SPT), academic self-perception (SAP). Perceptions of atmosphere (SPA) and social self-perception (SSP) were recorded on a five point Likert scale (0= strongly disagree to +4= strongly agree). Scores were added to calculate domain subscales and the overall scale. Over-emphasize of factual learning (1.69/4) and boredness (1.19/4) considered under the domain SPL and SSP, respectively were the only problematic areas (scale 2<3.5). Male students’ perception on teaching and their social perception were significantly better than that of female colleagues’. There were no problematic areas under SAP and SPA. Perception on teachers (SPT) (70.1%) was significantly better than SAP (64.9%) and SSP (63.3%). Male (68.4%) students held a significantly better overall perception than female (63.4%) counterparts. Students overall perception decreased until third year and then improved in fourth year upto the level of first year students’. Having a total score of 132/200, educational environment was found to be more positive than negative, though there was a considerable room for further improvements. Particular attention should be paid to address the issues related to female students, second and third year students, with respect to all five domains.