Students’ Insights on the Suitability and Adaptability of Two Undergraduate Medical and Dental Curricular Pathways before and during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-sectional Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown disrupted every human endeavour including the world of medical education, halting pre-clinical and clinical trainings as well as graduation of physicians for the healthcare workforce thus posing a double jeopardy at a time of dire need for increased healthcare personnel. The adaptability and preparedness of training curricula for emergencies such as natural and man-made disasters ultimately determine the degree of disruption in medical education. This study explored students’ insights on the efficacy and suitability of two curriculum pathways before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a descriptive, cross-sectional study conducted between 2020 and 2021 in a public medical school using 102-item questionnaire administered online to 300 medical and dental students exposed to different training curricula- a “Traditional Curriculum”, and a new “SPICCES Curriculum” that emphasizes student-centred designs. The questionnaire response rate was 93.3% comprising 55.7% and 44.3% female and male respondents, and 78.6% and 21.4% medical and dental students respectively with a mean age of 22.1 ± 2.39 years (range: 18-33 years). A total of 65.4% and 34.6% respondents were on the SPICCES and Traditional curriculum pathways respectively. More respondents in the SPICCES curriculum compared with the traditional curriculum track (70.5% vs 52.6%; χ2 = 8.862, p = 0.003, φ = -0.178) had favourable perspectives on the relevance of their program and the overall quality of the curriculum in preparing them to be rounded physicians for the 21st-century (59.0% vs 27.8%). Approximately 47.0% and 33.0% (χ2 = 3.990, p = 0.046, φ = -0.119) respondents in dentistry and medicine respectively had unfavourable perception about the relevance of the SPICCES curriculum. Findings in this study echo the need for student-centred curriculum designs and conducive educational environments that are resilient to emerging and established threats to educational pedagogy and programs. The study highlights the need for programs that support social and extracurricular activities for students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".