Evaluating the appropriateness of AccessMedicine in integrated biochemistry learning for chinese medical students.

Abstract

Recently, Chinese medical education has exhibited a shifting trend from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered learning, which usually includes a self-directed learning process. Providing students with high-quality and appropriate supplemental resources is necessary for their self-directed learning. This study aimed to investigate the appropriateness of AccessMedicine, an online medical resource, for first-year medical students at Tongji University in China. In the randomized controlled trial, 42 students were stratified by gender and grade point average (GPA) and randomly assigned to either the control group or AccessMedicine group. The students' learning outcomes were assessed with quizzes, including tests before and after learning and a final examination. Paired t-tests and two-way analysis of variance were performed for statistical analysis. We found that AccessMedicine-assisted learning improved student performance on tests and decreased the overall failure rate in the final examination. Further analysis showed that the final examination score of the subgroup with high GPAs in the AccessMedicine group significantly increased, but not that of the subgroup with low GPAs, indicating that AccessMedicine-assisted learning was more beneficial for good students than for poor students. A survey showed that professional vocabularies were the greatest obstacles to learning with AccessMedicine. Moreover, English language skills greatly affected the students' learning outcomes for the English resource but not those for the Chinese resource. Taken together, our results demonstrated that AccessMedicine was appropriate for Chinese medical education and improved the learning outcomes of students, especially students with high GPAs and a good command over the English language. © 2019 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 47(3):272-278, 2019.