Self-efficacy of medical students in a hybrid curriculum course (traditional and problem-based learning) and associated factors

Abstract

Self-efficacy consists of the judgment of one’s abilities to perform actions required to achieve a given performance, which has been considered predictive of performance. In academics, it means personal convictions in accomplishing a task to a defined degree of quality. Numerous studies have investigated medical students’ self-efficacy in traditional and PBL curricula. However, few studies have addressed the hybrid PBL scenario (Hpbl) that simultaneously contemplates PBL, traditional teaching, and practical activities. An even smaller number have evaluated the factors associated with this entity. With these considerations, we aimed to investigate the self-efficacy belief in the hPBL curriculum and the factors associated with this entity. This quantitative observational cross-sectional study was held between August 2022 and November 2022 in Fortaleza, a city in Northeast Brazil with almost 3 million inhabitants. The medical course has 12 semesters. The first two semesters use traditional teaching and cover the basic cycle, followed by the third to eighth semesters which correspond to the pre-clinical and clinical cycle. From the third semester onwards, traditional teaching and PBL are used simultaneously, which we call a hybrid model of PBL. The scale “Scale of Self-efficacy in Higher Education” was applied, a questionnaire validated for the Portuguese language consisting of 34 questions, with answers on a Likert-type scale with ten points, divided into five dimensions. To verify the association between sociodemographic factors and self-efficacy, simple and multiple linear models with robust errors were used. In total, 412 students participated in this study, most of them women (70.1%). The average age of students was 22.9 years. All domains had medians greater than 8, which means strong self-efficacy. The following factors were associated with higher self-efficacy scores in general after the multivariate analysis: female gender (8.6 vs. 8.3, p-value = 0.014), working (8.8 vs. 8.5, p-value = 0.019) and participating in extracurricular activities (8.7 vs. 8.1, p-value = 0.019). We conclude that medical students studying in hybrid learning models showed strong levels of self-efficacy. In addition, participating in extracurricular activities was associated with higher self-efficacy scores and males presented lower levels of self-efficacy.