Abstract:

Introduction:
Evidence based medicine (EBM) is essential in health sciences, and its learning has vital importance in health University studies. Due to the exponential growth in the last decades of some of these sciences, including Physiotherapy, the scientific literature about them has also increased. Therefore, how to search and to interpret scientific studies is taught along the whole Degree of Physiotherapy. However, students’ perception about the importance of this practice (i.e. scientific articles reading) is unknown and may be less in the first years of the Degree. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the Physiotherapy Degree students’ perception about learning how to read and interpret scientific articles.

Methodology:
Students of the Kinesitherapy subject of the Physiotherapy Degree of the University of Valencia were enrolled in this study. This subject, which takes place on the second year of a total of four, was selected for being the first annual subject on specific Physiotherapy content. The study took place along the years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020. During those two years, how to read, interpret and criticize scientific studies was taught to the students as part of the theoretical block of the subject, using the abstract format (i.e. the most relevant studies information). At the end of the theoretical part of the 2019/2020 year, second- and third-year students (100 students per group) were encouraged to participate in a survey. This survey consisted in assess from 1 to 10 the importance perception they gave to learn how to interpret and criticize scientific studies using abstract format. That way, second-year students had recently learnt how to do it, and for the rest of the third-year students it had been already a year. Articles, contents and professors were the same in both years.

Results:
The second-year group (n=53) showed an importance perception mean of 6.86 (SD 1.72) about 10 in front of the mean of 8.22 (SD 1.66) about 10 that was presented by the third-year group (n=45). Both groups showed a significant difference (p=0.03), being the importance perception a 20% higher among the third-year students.

Conclusions:
Considering these results, the importance perception of Physiotherapy Degree students of how to interpret scientific studies increase after one year. This could be due to the progressive specialization that takes place along the Degree. Since the third-year students’ importance perception could be considered as especially high, we believe our finding support an early and continuing formation of this practice in the Degree in Physiotherapy.

Keywords:

Importance perception, Education, Innovation, Abstract, Classroom-based learning.