DEVELOPMENT OF HYPOTHESISING SKILLS IN BIOPHYSICAL CONTEXT AMONG MEDICAL STUDENTS

Introduction:
The use of science process skills is an everyday part of medical praxis. Furthermore the application of the Evidence-Based Medicine requires advanced science process skills of healthcare professionals.
Although the unsatisfactory level of science process skills of pre-medical and pre-dental students, it has been the subject of research since the 70s of the 20th century. The content and form of practical training in medical biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava (FM CU) was not explicitly aimed on development of science process skills up to now.
The project “Monitoring and development of scientific abilities of university students of medical and biomedical study programmes” is focused on development and verification of assessment tools that allow monitor students' actual level of science process skills. The second goal of the project is to develop original problem-based context-dependent tasks that can improve selected skills.

Material and methods:
In winter semester 2016/17 the experimental intervention was applied in practical training on Medical biophysics at FM CU. Four groups of first year general medicine students took part in the pedagogical research. Totally 31 students studying in English language (mainly from Germany and Poland) and 35 students studying in Slovak language were involved.
The process of hypothesising was introduced at the beginning of the semester by the activity “Black boxes investigation” based on [1]. Later, during the semester students solved several tasks (multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions) focused on hypothesizing.

Preliminary results:
At the beginning of their university study, 34% of Slovak students and 48% of foreign students involved in the research were able to identify among three given sentences the statement that can be considered as a hypothesis. Only 17% of Slovak students and 26% of foreign students were able to form their own hypothesis related to their current practical task (Anthropometry).
Some progress was obtained, nevertheless a significant part of students did not develop real operational skill to form hypothesis, identify variables and suggest the procedure of verifying their hypothesis. More results will be available in January.

Conclusion:
Research results show that the initial hypothesising skills of medical students are insufficient. Initial activity, implicit inclusion of hypothesising in practical tasks and questions on hypothesising in continuous tests do not lead to sufficient improvement of students’ hypothesising skills. It is necessary to re-formulate practical training tasks in order to make hypothesising explicit and prepare special hypothesising tasks in biophysical context to give students more opportunities to develop their hypothesising skills.

Acknowledgements:
This work was supported by KEGA 037UK-4/2016 "Monitoring and development of scientific abilities of university students of medical and biomedical study programmes”.

References:
[1] http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/educators/mystery-boxes-private (quoted on 20.8.2016)