Attitudes toward statistics in medical postgraduates: measuring, evaluating and monitoring

BMC Medical Education

Research Article

Haixia Su¹  Rui Wang²  Chanjuan Li²  Yuhai Zhang²  Lei Shang²  Yongyong Xu²  Qinbo Zhao³ 

[1] Department of Epidemiology and the Ministry of Education Key Lab of Hazard Assessment and Control in Special Operational Environment, School of Public Health, Fourth Military Medical University, Changle West Road 169#, Shaanxi, 710032, Xi’an, China;Department of Health Statistics and the Ministry of Education Key Lab of Hazard Assessment and Control in Special Operational Environment, School of Public Health, Fourth Military Medical University, Changle West Road 169#, Shaanxi, 710032, Xi’an, China;Department of Mathematics, Fourth Military Medical University, Changle West Road 169#, Shaanxi, 710032, Xi’an, China;

关键词: Medical postgraduate;    Statistics;    Survey of attitudes toward statistics;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6920-12-117

 received in 2011-12-07, accepted in 2012-11-07,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn medical training, statistics is considered a very difficult course to learn and teach. Current studies have found that students’ attitudes toward statistics can influence their learning process. Measuring, evaluating and monitoring the changes of students’ attitudes toward statistics are important. Few studies have focused on the attitudes of postgraduates, especially medical postgraduates. Our purpose was to understand current attitudes regarding statistics held by medical postgraduates and explore their effects on students’ achievement. We also wanted to explore the influencing factors and the sources of these attitudes and monitor their changes after a systematic statistics course.MethodsA total of 539 medical postgraduates enrolled in a systematic statistics course completed the pre-form of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics −28 scale, and 83 postgraduates were selected randomly from among them to complete the post-form scale after the course.ResultsMost medical postgraduates held positive attitudes toward statistics, but they thought statistics was a very difficult subject. The attitudes mainly came from experiences in a former statistical or mathematical class. Age, level of statistical education, research experience, specialty and mathematics basis may influence postgraduate attitudes toward statistics. There were significant positive correlations between course achievement and attitudes toward statistics. In general, student attitudes showed negative changes after completing a statistics course.ConclusionsThe importance of student attitudes toward statistics must be recognized in medical postgraduate training. To make sure all students have a positive learning environment, statistics teachers should measure their students’ attitudes and monitor their change of status during a course. Some necessary assistance should be offered for those students who develop negative attitudes.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zhang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.