Abstract
BackgroundResearch examining the effects of academic interest on students learning achievement across various disciplines, especially a comparison of the effects of academic interest between medical sciences and other disciplines, is still scarce. This study addressed this gap by answering ‘does academic interest play a more important role in medical sciences than in other disciplines?’.MethodsA retrospective cross-sectional study, based on a large project of the National Undergraduate Student Development Survey (NUSDS) conducted by the Ministry of Education of China and Peking University in 2014, was designed to explore the role of academic interest in medical sciences and other disciplines. The participants were resampled to better represent the national distribution of undergraduate students in terms of their demographic characteristics. Specifically, survey data from 54,398 undergraduate students from 87 Chinese universities and colleges were used to address our research questions. We then used the propensity score matching (PSM) model to estimate the effect of academic interest on academic achievement and to compare the effects across different disciplines.ResultsAcademic interest had a significant positive impact on academic performance, with an effect size of 2.545 (p = 0.000). Specifically, the effect sizes for the disciplines of medical sciences, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering were 2.310 (p = 0.000), 2.231 (p = 0.000), 2.016 (p = 0.000), 3.840 (p = 0.000) and 2.698 (p = 0.000), respectively. The results show that no particular academic interest in medical sciences is needed to achieve academic success when compared with natural sciences and engineering programmes, but success in medical sciences requires more academic interest than success in humanities or social sciences.ConclusionsThis study clarifies the effect of academic interest on undergraduates’ academic achievement while controlling for their demographic characteristics and family factors. The results provide insights into the role of academic interest in academic performance across various disciplines and can inform the college admissions practices of both institutions and high school students in China.
Highlights
Research examining the effects of academic interest on students learning achievement across various disciplines, especially a comparison of the effects of academic interest between medical sciences and other disciplines, is still scarce
Considering the richness and completeness of the dataset used in this study, we argue that the positive effect of academic interest on learning achievement is a general principle in academic settings
This study examined the relationship between academic interest and achievement using a comprehensive largescale dataset, the National Undergraduate Student Development Survey, from which we obtained data for 54, 398 undergraduate students from 87 Chinese universities and colleges
Summary
Research examining the effects of academic interest on students learning achievement across various disciplines, especially a comparison of the effects of academic interest between medical sciences and other disciplines, is still scarce. This study addressed this gap by answering ‘does academic interest play a more important role in medical sciences than in other disciplines?’. Medical schools select their students according to various criteria, including academic achievement, general cognitive ability, personality and interpersonal skills [1]. A positive reciprocal relationship between interest and academic achievement was revealed in students from grade 5 to 7 in the domain of mathematics, whilst initial individual interest was found to have no influence on undergraduate students’ grades in an introductory psychology course [7]
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