Understanding Underperformance in Medical Students and Effective Strategies for Remediation

Background: Medical students in difficulty who are underperforming have a significant impact on their teachers and the institution, as remediation is time-consuming, emotionally draining and resource-intensive. Current approaches to remediation lack a clear theoretical basis and mainly consist of general support and providing opportunities to repeated short-term practice. Understanding why students underperform and how we can support them through systematic remediation activities is crucial with relevant policy making to assist these students and improve their independent thinking and judgement with performance. Aims: develop a relevant policy making for our difficulty students 1. To explore the reasons for the underperformance in undergraduate students, such as low scores in assessments, maladaptation, ethical issues, physical and mental illness, patient safety etc. 2. To develop their abilities in their independent thinking and judgment and implement a remediation activity using the e-book for students in difficulty, and 3. To systematically evaluate the long term-effects after 1 year of this intervention in medical education. Research design: This exploratory and intervention study is a two center 3-year programme of work. In the first year, we will explore the underperformance in undergraduate students. This will be discussed in our team before the study. Questionnaires will be sent to the students and mentors to explore the challenges and their explanations of underperformance. We will also ask about their perceived needs around support strategies. The qualitative data will be collected by focus group (followed by individual) interviews and analyzed with grounded theory and Atlas-ti software. In the second year, we will develop and implement a theoretically-informed (teaching on the run, TOTR) and tailored e-book for student remediation. The content is readily accessible from smartphones, tablets and computers to support our students’ real-time and timely learning. In the third year, we will use realist research to evaluate the effects of the e-book for our students’ learning via questionnaire (mails) and the contacts (“LINE” media and e-mails etc.) longitudinally for the next 1 year.

Project ID:PF10608-0964
External Project ID:MOST106-2511-S182-007-MY2