Abstract
BackgroundEarly clinical exposure (ECE) is viewed as a way to provide contexts of basic science and highlight its relevance to medical practice. However, very few studies have specifically looked into how the ECE experience contributes to students’ academic performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether ECE experiences (external cause) or students’ learning attitudes (internal cause) more closely correlated with medical students’ academic performance.MethodsSubjects who participated in the study comprised 109 s-year students at Taipei Medical University. Fifty of the 109 study participants were enrolled in an elective ECE program. The dependent variable in this study was the test score of a systems-based basic sciences (SBBS) course. Independent variables of the study included students’ attitudes and test anxiety towards the SBBS course, engagement/length of time spent in ECE, and the ECE learning environment. Data of students’ engagement in ECE, levels of their motivational beliefs and test anxiety, differences in the ECE learning environment, and the SBBS final test scores of these 109 respondents were collected for hierarchical multiple regression (HMR) analyses.ResultsResults of the HMR analyses revealed that students’ test anxiety towards basic science and also the learning environment of the ECE had significant positive predictive power on their SBBS test scores.ConculsionThis study discovers that medical students’ academic performance in basic science correlates not only with their anxiety to testing, but even more so with the clinical environment they are exposed to. Hence we suggest including further investigations about different learning environments on ECE experiences in future studies.
Highlights
Clinical exposure (ECE) is viewed as a way to provide contexts of basic science and highlight its relevance to medical practice
Model II showed that the model itself had significant goodness, and students’ test anxiety toward basic science had significant positive predictive power on their academic performance
A noteworthy finding here is that when the Early clinical exposure (ECE) environment factors was considered and three dummy variables were included in model III, the length of ECE showed its significant yet negative effect as its standardized β(− 0.299) indicated, which seemingly implied medical students might spend their time on ECE at the price of academic performance
Summary
Clinical exposure (ECE) is viewed as a way to provide contexts of basic science and highlight its relevance to medical practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether ECE experiences (external cause) or students’ learning attitudes (internal cause) more closely correlated with medical students’ academic performance. Several current studies have described the early clinical exposure (ECE) experience and its positive contributions to medical education, but very few quantitative studies have further attempted to explain factors that contribute to a successful ECE experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlations between medical students’ academic performance and personal or environmental factors. ECE is often defined as authentic human contact in a social or clinical context during the preclinical medical years [2,3,4]. In terms of the preclinical medical years, ECE should occur before the official clerkship and internship training programs [5]
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