Abstract:

Introduction:
Lack of motivation among university students has become a problem. If students do not see the value of the skills they gain in university for their future life and work, they may not be sufficiently motivated to learn these skills. Teamwork is one of the methods related to the teaching-learning process that allows for active student participation, and is one of the proposed strategies to tackle the lack of motivation.

Objective:
Find out whether a health education programme carried out in a real-life setting with the elderly improves student motivation in Physiotherapy in Primary Care (PPC), a third-year physiotherapy degree subject.

Method:
145 PPC students were randomly divided into two groups: traditional work group (GTT) (n=57) and innovative work group (GTI) (n=88). Each of these two groups was divided into subgroups of 12-15 students, which were then randomly given topics to work on. The same topics were given to each of the subgroups (GTT and GTI). The thematic area of work in both work groups was the prevention and promotion of health in distinct diseases in the elderly.

Traditional work: students present their work in the university classrooms.
Innovative work: students work with an actual population of elderly people. In addition, the method included the recording of a video of guidelines for therapeutic exercise, which is provided to the users. In order to record the video, students had to interact with the actual users, explaining the exercises to them, supervising their execution and recording the video with them. The students then exhibited the final work to the residents of an elderly centre.

In order to evaluate the results of this work, a student motivation questionnaire was carried out. This anonymous questionnaire was made up of 16 questions with Likert-type responses (1-5), where 1 indicates “strongly disagree” and 5 indicates “strongly agree”. To form comparisons of motivation levels between the students of group GTT with group GTI, a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was carried out to compare the medians of each of the responses to the motivation questionnaire questions.

Results:
Results suggest that the innovative method of work is considered by students to be more attractive and motivating than the traditional work method. Although there were no significant differences between the two methods of work in the rest of the questions, it is important to underline that a general positive trend existed in the rating of the innovative method as compared to the traditional method. For example, 73.97% of the GTI students considered the work as a motivational tool for the subject, while only 65.28% of the GTT students were of the same opinion.

Conclusions:
Cooperative work applied to the real population through this innovative method has been demonstrated to be a positive and motivating experience for third-year physiotherapy degree students. Being able to work with real patients adds motivation and practical application to the knowledge and competencies that the subject and university learning process provide.

References:
[1] Houghton, C. E., Casey, D., Shaw, D., & Murphy, K. (2013). Students’ experiences of implementing clinical skills in the real world of practice. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 22(13-14), 1961-1969.
[2] Sedden, M. L., & Clark, K. R. (2016). Motivating Students in the 21st Century. Radiologic Technology, 87(6), 609-616.

Keywords:

Motivation, collaborative work, health education, primary care, elderly.