Student self-efficacy scores improve on twelve career skills with weekly professional skills development assignments in a senior physiology laboratory course

Abstract

At Michigan State University (MSU), the undergraduate capstone laboratory course for the physiology major places an emphasis on broad development opportunities for students. The course expands on prior knowledge from the undergraduate curriculum with firsthand human physiology activities, but also includes activities on career skills. Since Fall 2019, for six semesters, each weekly homework assignment for the course includes a professional development activity, including self-assessments and reflections on teamwork, leadership style, grit, conflict management, and other key career skills. Deidentified pre- and post-course professional skills surveys were used to assess student perceptions of their proficiency with these skills (n=313). This self-efficacy survey began as a tool for the teaching staff to tailor activities and experiences but became an indicator for self-reported improvements in student professional profiles during the course. The survey consists of twelve questions using five-point Likert scale responses to rank self-efficacy on essential career skills such as contributing to a team, thinking critically, and communicating effectively. Anecdotally, students frequently inform the teaching staff how they directly apply their results from these activities and experiences, sharing their direct use-cases for job, graduate, or professional school applications and interviews. Student feedback reflects how these intentional methods have significant meaning to them by the end of the semester. They often state they were unaware of and would not have worked on professional skills preparation on their own time, either because they were unaware of the tools available, or they did not see the relevance in the current stage of their career. Students reported an improvement in their own professional skills. The greatest improvement over the semester occurs with work-life balance. Although both pre- and post-response averages for this question are lower overall at 3.23 and 3.97 respectively, the delta change is greatest at a 0.73 increase (p<0.001). The highest overall initial average and smallest delta value is on performance integrity. The pre- and post-response averages of 4.31 and 4.61 (delta change of 0.30) implies students already perceive their academic performance as conforming with this professional value. All 12 skills assessed on the survey had significant improvement (p<0.001) when comparing pre- and post-semester responses. The survey concludes with two open-ended questions and deeper assessment of the free response answers is underway. Overall, students perceive improvement in their professional skills by completing in-class assignments. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.