Publication: Preclinical medical students’ perceptions of anatomy education environment in Universiti Sains Malaysia before and during the covid-19 pandemic
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Date
2022
Authors
Hisham, Sofiah Hanis Ahmad
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Abstract
Background: Providing a positive education environment is important for students’ learning and to attain good academic achievements. However, the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had disrupted students’ learning as face-to-face learning was rapidly converted to fully remote learning. Hence, students were deprived of physical learning resources which are important modalities for anatomy learning. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the USM's preclinical medical students' perceptions of the anatomy education environment before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methodology: A mixed method study that utilises quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied in this study. A total of 156 first-and second-year students of academic session 2020/2021 in the Doctor of Medicine Degree Programme, USM participated in this study. The Anatomy Education Environment Measurement Inventory, 26 items (AEEMI-26), a sociodemographic form, and a subjective question on experiences and challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic were distributed to consented students in an electronic form. A quantitative approach that applied a cross-sectional design was used to compare data from AEEMI-26 between the COVID-19 cohort and pre-COVID-19 cohort obtained from a previous study. The pre-COVID-19 cohort involved 136 first-and second-year students of academic session 2018/2019 in the Doctor of Medicine Degree Programme, USM. Meanwhile, a qualitative approach using phenomenology research design was implemented by applying thematic analysis to COVID-19 cohort’s responses regarding experiences and challenges in learning anatomy during COVID-19 to supplement the findings of the quantitative analysis. Results: The response rate of this study was 75% and the dropout rate was 4%. The majority of the participants were female, Malay, Malaysians, 21 years old, and first-year students. Anatomy knowledge relevance and positive and negative perceptions of anatomy teachers domains were perceived as positive areas for both pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 cohorts. However, anatomy subject mastery and learning resources domains were perceived as areas of improvement for both cohorts. Comparison of pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 domains’ scores mainly revealed significantly higher scores in the COVID-19 cohort, except for the anatomy subject mastery domain which showed a not significantly lesser score in the COVID-19 cohort. Six themes were reported for the COVID-19 cohort experiences and challenges in anatomy learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions: The anatomy education environment in USM in terms of anatomy knowledge relevance and anatomy teachers was positive. However, the anatomy learning resources and anatomy subject mastery in USM require some improvements. Furthermore, the students faced experiences and challenges in anatomy learning during COVID-19 similar to students in other institutions globally. Future studies should investigate the relationship between factors affecting the anatomy education environment and students’ academic performance after the COVID-19 pandemic
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