Educational Research in Medical Sciences
Volume:2 Issue: 2, Jan 2013

Scientific educational-research festivals are regularly designed programmes in which one or more educational or research areas are discussed. Every festival is usually focused on a specific academic domain, and relevant activities in one specific time period (e.g. One year) are investigated. These festivals provide an appropriate situation for the scientific competition among educational and research institutions. Scientific festivals have long been held around the world, but educational and research festivals in Islamic republic of Iran have been organized in the recent decades to monitor activities carried out in the given domains.

Acquisition of intelligible English pronunciation and comprehension of medical texts has been considered as an important need for medical students. This can be improved by employing different methods and taking into consideration various learning styles of students. This study is an attempt to reveal the effect of cooperative learning on enhancing pronunciation and reading comprehension in students of medicine in Yasuj University of Medical Sciences. All 60 students of medicine in Yasuj University of Medical Sciences who enrolled in English for specific purposes 1st Feb 2013 took part in this quasi experimental study and were divided into two groups of thirties, according to the enrollment list. Cooperative learning was implemented with the experimental group dividing them into groups of five randomly, while the control group was taught with traditional method. Phonetic transcriptions were used along with passages taken from their book for the two groups. The data collected from three reading aloud tasks, scores of pretest, and midterm and final written examinations were analyzed using SPSS software, version19. The results of the study showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group significantly (P<0.05) in all areas of reading aloud tests, pronunciation, and comprehension. It is concluded that cooperative learning significantly improves medical students’ pronunciation and comprehension. Teaching pronunciation and comprehension through cooperative learning yields better learning results for university students.

Critical Thinking Disposition indicates individual’s inclination to Critical Thinking, which is one of the domains of personality. Individual characteristics are important and influential factors in the growth and development of students’ Critical Thinking. One of these influential characteristics might be self-esteem, thus this study was to determine the correlation between Critical Thinking Disposition and self-esteem in medical students. In an analytical cross-sectional study, 289 medical students were selected through stratified random sampling method in Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in 2011. The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire containing 3 parts: demographic data, California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory, and Cooper-Smith Self-Esteem Inventory. The results were analyzed by SPSS-16 using descriptive statistics, Pearson and Spearman Correlation Coefficient, ANOVA, Chi-Square and Fisher exact test. Results showed that 98.6% (285) of students had deficiency, 1.4% (4) ambivalence and nobody had positive critical thinking disposition. There was a significantly negative correlation between Critical Thinking Disposition and self-esteem (r=-0.462, P<0.001). Also, there was no a significant relationship between two groups of low self-esteem, high self-esteem, negative and ambivalent Critical Thinking Disposition. It seems that Critical Thinking Disposition, like other psychological variables, is influenced by social factors and social environment plays a role in promoting or undermining it. So, similar studies are recommended to investigate the factors affecting Critical Thinking in medical students.

Social intelligence and entrepreneurship are among features leading to the academic and career achievements. Due to the importance of this issue, the present study was performed to determine the level of entrepreneurial skills in students of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences and its association with social intelligence. In this descriptive cross-sectional study by using systematic random sampling method, we selected 350 students at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. Data were collected using entrepreneurial skills standard and social intelligence questionnaires. Reliability and validity of two questionnaires have been already assessed in previous studies. Results analyzed by descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient test. Students’ entrepreneurial skill was totally 255.69 which is assessed at poor scores range. Research findings also indicated the presence of a statistically significantly positive association between social intelligence and risk-taking (r=0.14 P=0.035), locus of control (r=0.72, P=0.019), need to achievement (r=0.54, P=0.012), mental health (r=0.53, P=0.033), pragmatism (r=0.45, P=0.04), ambiguity toleration (r=0.58, P=0.029), positive thinking (r=0.72, P=0.019), and challenging (r=0.29, P=0.016). Given the students’ poor entrepreneurial skills and the correlation between social intelligence and entrepreneurial components, it is recommended to strengthen social intelligence and consequently promote entrepreneurial skills.

Evaluation of teachers is considered among top priorities in an educational institution. Most of the universities around the world including universities in Iran have considered feedback from students as the only or main source of assessment of the quality of teaching process for many years. Regarding the existing disagreements in evaluation, the purpose of this study is to investigate the factors affecting teachers’ evaluation from the viewpoint of the students’ at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences This descriptive analytical study was performed with the participation of 848 students studying at second semester or above in 91-92 academic year. Self-administrated questionnaire was used to collect data. Content validity of the questionnaire was determined by the respective experts, and its reliability was calculated 0.73 through Chronbach’s alpha test. The results were analyzed by SPSS-16 using descriptive statistics, Kolmogrov-Smirnov, Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis and Chi-square tests. Results showed that from the students’ viewpoint, the areas of teaching skills (74.93±17.06), teacher’s personal characteristics (71.23±15.43), physical features and time of course presentation (68.41±25.10), student’s personal characteristics and attitude (63.79±20.83), and the quality of evaluation process in the university were important, respectively. In addition, there was a significant difference between two genders in the areas of teaching skills (P=0.007) and teacher’s personal characteristics (P=0.015). In scope of teaching skills, the most important effective factors on teachers’ evaluation based on the students’ viewpoint were teachers’ knowledge and scientific proficiency in the course subject, teachers’ efforts to convey the course materials, and teacher’s manner of expression, respectively.

Clinical training is an important process in residency academic program in different fields. In this cross-sectional descriptive study, we identified the views of clinical residents about clinical training status at Yazd University of Medical Sciences at their second-year of residency or above. We used questionnaire as the instrument for collecting information and select all residents as the sample of study. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistical tests. Clinical training status was assessed to be at an intermediate level by residents, and the areas of evaluation method, resources and facilities, training system, performance, performance of personnel of therapeutic departments, and resident’s performance received the highest score, respectively. Areas of evaluation method and facilities were determined as strengths, and areas of the performance of therapeutic department’s personnel and residents as the weaknesses of clinical training.

Clinical training provides the possibility of learning a wide range of important diseases that doctors may encounter in their future career. The present study was conducted to analyze the viewpoint of the students on the outpatient clinical training. This descriptive study was carried out on 109 medical students during internship using convenience sampling. Data were collected by a questionnaire designed to gather the medical students’ viewpoints about outpatient clinical training. Data were analyzed by SPSS software using chi-square test. From 109 students, 57.1% of them were female and 30.6% evaluated the outpatient clinical training status as highly appropriate, 32.2% as inappropriate and 29.4% considered the physical conditions of the clinic as inappropriate. The major challenges for the students were physical conditions, lack of access to scientific resources and independent activity of the students. However, the strength was the role of subspecialist in education.

Test anxiety is a common phenomenon among students and is one of the problems of educational system. The present study was conducted to investigate the test anxiety in vital statistics course and its association with academic performance of students at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. This study was descriptive-analytical and the study sample included the students studying in nursing and midwifery, paramedicine and health faculties that had taken vital statistics course and were selected through census method. Sarason questionnaire was used to analyze the test anxiety. Data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings indicated no significant correlation between test anxiety and score of vital statistics course.

Knowledge of dental specialties leads to referral and proper therapy. The present study was intended to determine the knowledge of non-dental students about dental specialties. In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 703 students form among all students of Kermanshah were selected based on their responses to 9 questions and the results were classified into 3 groups of poor, average and good. Data were analyzed by SPSS (version 18) using chi-square test. In terms of knowledge, 38 (5.4%), 261 (37.1%) and 404 (57.5%) were classified into poor, average and good groups, respectively. The knowledge of female non-dental students was significantly higher than that of the male counterpart (P_value<0.05). No significant difference was reported between non-dental and dental students. It seems that the students investigated in this study have acceptable knowledge about dental specialties. It is necessary to make more attempts to make different dental specialties known to the public and in the society.

Multiple choice tests are the most common objective tests in medical education which are used to assess the ind­ividual knowledge, recall, recognition and problem solving abilities. One of the testing components is the post-test analysis. This component includes; first, qualitative analysis of the taxonomy of questions based on the Bloom’s educational objectives and percentage of the questions with no structural problems; and second, the quantitative analysis of the reliability (KR-20) and indices of difficulty and differentiation (1). This descriptive-analytical study was aimed to qualitatively and quan­titatively investigate the multiple-choice tests of the faculty members at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in 2009-2010. The sample size comprised of 156 tests. Data were analyzed by SPSS-16 software using t-test, chi-squared test, ANOVA and Tukey multiple comparison tests.The mean of reliability (KR-20), difficulty index, and discrimination index were 0.68 (± 0.31), 0.56 (± 0.15) and 0.21 (± 0.15), respectively, which were acceptable. The analysis of the tests at Mashad University of Medical Sciences indicated that the mean for the reliability of the tests was 0.72, and 52.2% of the tests had inappropriate difficulty index and 49.2% of the tests did not have acceptable differentiation index (2). Comparison of the tests at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences for the fields of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, statistics and behavioral sciences courses at Malaysia Faculty of Medicine (3) and tests at Argentina Faculty of Medicine (4) showed that while difficulty index was acceptable in all three universities, but differentiation indices in Malaysia and Argentina Medical Faculties were higher than that in Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences.The mean for the questions with no structural flaws in all tests, taxonomy I, taxonomy II, and taxonomy III were 73.88% (± 14.88), 34.65% (± 15.78), 41.34% (± 13.14) and 23.99% (± 15.40), respectively. Comparison of the variances of qualitative and quantitative indices indicated significant differences between difficulty index, differ­entiation index, reliability of the total test and percentage of taxonomy II among faculties (P_value<0.001), but this differences were not observed in taxonomies I and III. The results of Tukey multiple comparison test revealed a statistically significantly increase in the reliability of the medical faculty tests (P_value=0.001) and a statistically significantly decrease in the difficulty index of paramedi­cal faculty tests compared to other faculties (P_value =0.041). Due to the lower differentiation index, the per­centage of taxonomies II and III and the percentage of the questions with no structural problems compared to the standard criterion in some faculties, it is necessary to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback for the faculty members, as mentioned in previous studies (5) to promote their knowledge in designing the multiple-choice questions as an assessing tool of students.