Abstract:

Khalifa University College of Medicine and Health Sciences (CMHS) is the first medical school developed in the city of Abu Dhabi and the first 4 tier post baccalaureate MD program in the UAE. Cohorts are approximately 50% local Emirati and 50% international postgraduate students with undergraduate degrees varying from Pharmacy, Biological Sciences, and Biochemistry to various forms of Engineering. Recently, our 4th cohort of students have commenced their journey toward becoming physicians.

Medical schools admit a diverse student body. Standard criteria used as indicators of academic success include a high GPA, MCAT score and performance in a personal interview. Despite meeting these criteria, many students who start medical school perform poorly or fail when faced with the rigors of the first-year curriculum. Transitioning from the stable, didactic undergraduate milieu to the reality of medical school “fire hose” of information is challenging for medical students’ worldwide. Medical curricula employ compressed, volume intensive coverage over limited time frames providing little opportunity for repetition, revisitation, and consolidation. A significant amount of students’ time is spent acquiring facts in various specialties which are subsequently examined in a multiple-choice style examination. Students sometimes feel overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of factual knowledge they need to learn. Research has demonstrated a need to explore other “academic markers” that may explain underperformance of students in the first year of medical school. Examples include information processing, test-taking strategies, attitude, motivation, and anxiety. Several studies have reported a relationship between learning/study strategies and academic achievement. Our research has shown that many students who underperform in the first course in medical school, continue using the same techniques for study, time management, preparing for exams and proceed to underperform in subsequent courses. Students have commented on the time it takes to “learn how to learn”, to identify resources to use for a course, to establish an effective study technique and the experience of often not reaching the level they need to be at until a much later course.

The Learning and Study Skills Inventory (LASSI) is a 10 sub-scale, 60 item survey instrument that assesses students’ awareness and implementation of learning and study strategies. It is designed to collect non-cognitive information for diagnostic purposes and to inform appropriate interventions in improving students’ academic outcomes, evaluation of learning strategies interventions, and predicting students’ success. We have assessed students’ awareness, learning and study strategies over this 4-year period and followed up with focus groups to further understand challenges students face with learning. Using a 360o approach, we have developed a module on “Learning how to Learn” encompassing a series of workshops delivered to incoming medical students as part of Transitions week which takes place the week prior to the start of medical school. We report the content of this module and subsequent feedback to date.

Keywords:

Self-regulation, study skills, learning, cognitive load, underperformance.