Abstract:

Biophysics and Medical physics belong together with chemistry and biology to learning subjects, which create the base for other medical study subjects. They are important for understanding physical chemical nature of functioning of human organism. According results of PISA 2015 testing, knowledge level of Science is 3 or 4 for more than 30% of Slovak grammar school students.[1] According this evaluation students can use more or moderately complex content knowledge to construct explanation of familiar phenomena. [2] Despite that fact, our teaching experience shows, that students do not know to use acquired physical knowledge for solution simple physical medical model tasks at the level required for the study of medicine.

The aim of our study was to determine physical functional literacy focused on medical sciences among 288 students of medicine after completion of Biophysics and Medical physics.

There was used original didactic test with the choice of one correct answer. It contains 20 tasks – 11 of them were focused on vital function measurement, administration of medicines and positioning the patient. Nine tasks were in line with the State Educational Program of the Slovak Grammar schools. [3, 4] They were focused on physical properties of liquids, centre of gravity, gravitational force, reading from calibrated scale and conversion of physical units. The design of test allowed using similar knowledge to solve both parts of the test. The threshold for the both parts of the test was set at 60% of correct answers.

The overall success ability of the students in the first part of the test was in average 61% of the correct answers - just above the threshold set by us. The success ability of the second part of the test was almost 79%.

Our results show, that despite of satisfactory level of physical knowledge of students, they are unable to use them for solving model tasks in their study program - medicine. Hence, this knowledge cannot be maximally used for study followed clinical subjects and later applied in medical practice. We expect that the partial elimination of this phenomenon could occur not only by changing the way of teaching but also emphasizing interdisciplinary relations between biology and physics at secondary schools. [1, 5] These often missing relationships are not known to students and sometimes also to teachers of the science.

Acknowledgement:
This work is supported by grant projects GP 003UK-4/2016 and GP 026UK-4/2017.

References:
[1] PISA 2015. Results in focus. OECD 2018, 31p. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa2015results-in-focus.pdf
[2] Summamry description of the seven levels of proficiency in science in PISA 2015. Programme for international student assessment. OECD2018. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/summary-description-seven-levels-of-proficiency-science-pisa-2015.htm
[3] Inovative State Educational Program for 4-years and 5-years grammar schools. Physics. State Pedagogical Institute. Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. 2015.
[4] Innovative State Educational Program for 8- years grammar schools. Physics. State Pedagogical Institute. Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. 2015.
[5] Kráľová, E., Ferencová, E. A better understanding of clinical applications of medical biophysics through semester projects? Proceedings ICERI 2017. Valencia IATED Academy 2017. pp 7310-7313

Keywords:

Physical functional literacy, study of medicine, PISA testing, State Educational Program of Slovak Republic, levels of proficiency in science in PISA.