Abhijit Datta1, Sayantika Ghosh2, Rituparna Das3
BACKGROUND
A warm, optimally supportive, challenging, and competitive environment is widely
regarded as an essential pre-requisite for best possible learning. Students’
satisfaction on educational environment influences their learning approach and
outcome. The Dundee ready educational environment measure (DREEM) is a
globally accepted valid tool to assess educational environment during
undergraduate medical education, in which students are scored for 50 items with
a total global score of 200. This study was undertaken, as there had been paucity
of relevant data from north-east India, with the aim of assessing students’
perception of their educational environment in paraclinical training during second
professional MBBS course.
METHODS
This was a cross-sectional survey-based study conducted during the months of
September and October, 2017 involving 168 second professional MBBS-students
of third and fifth semesters of Government Medical College of north-east India.
DREEM questionnaire was used to assess the educational environment, as
perceived by the students, during paraclinical training.
RESULTS
This study showed that the mean global score involving all the domains was
119.58 ± 46.95, suggesting a ‘more positive than negative’ educational
environment prevailing in the institute during paraclinical training. The individual
domain scores for their - perception of learning was 29.90 ± 5.32, perception of
teachers was 27.68 ± 4.13, academic self-perception was 18.96 ±
3.78, perception of atmosphere was 26.93 ± 6.40 and social self-perception was
16.11 ± 3.34, suggesting that the training was moving in right direction across all
the domains of educational environment, though was not optimally perfect.
CONCLUSIONS
The present study revealed a suboptimal perception of undergraduate medical
students in all the domains of educational environment in paraclinical phase. The
overall educational environment during paraclinical teaching moving in a
satisfactory direction though was not excellent. Social perspectives of the
educational environment need to be further improved.
