Pre-tertiary Education, Ethnicity, and Attitudes of Asian Medical Undergraduates Towards Communication Skills

Overview

Journal Int J Med Educ

Specialty Medical Education

Date 2019 Jan 28

PMID 30685752

Authors

Andrew Ls Foong

Chew-Fei Sow

Shamala Ramasamy

Poh-Sin Yap

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objectives: This study was aimed at determining whether the pre-tertiary education system and ethnicity have any association with the attitudes of medical undergraduates towards communication skills. It also sought to determine if attitudes should have any relationship with communication skills assessment outcomes.

Methods: A cross-section survey design was performed with 323 participants from two cohorts of medical undergraduates, i.e., first-year (n = 153) and second-year students (n = 170) who completed the Communication Skills Attitude Scale. Participants comprised of the main ethnic groups in Malaysia, i.e., Malays, Chinese and Indians, from different language medium pre-tertiary education backgrounds. Attitude measurements were compared with OSCE outcomes.

Results: There was a significant difference in Negative Attitude Scale between pre-tertiary education system with attitudes towards communication skills (F = 7.79, p = .001), but no significant difference with Positive Attitude Scale (F = 0.43, p = .649). There was no significant difference between ethnicity and attitudes towards communication skills with PAS (F = 0.66, p = .519) and NAS (F = 1.24, p = .291). Students from Chinese medium education system had stronger negative attitudes with a mean score of 14.7 (n = 56, SD = 3.6) for primary school levels and 15.9 (n = 17, SD = 3.0) for secondary school levels, compared with others. There was no significant prediction of student's attitudes towards assessments outcomes.

Conclusions: Preliminary findings from the small data pool suggest indicative relationships requiring further studies with more participants and proportionate pre-tertiary education system backgrounds.

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