DREEM tool: Perception of learning environment through the eyes of medical students

Abstract

Abstract Background In the present era of quality accreditation, considering quality of medical education is also very important, especially in developing countries. Since last few years there is massive increase in number of medical colleges in Haryana, India but is this affecting the standard of medical education too? So, the present study was planned to understand the current state of medical education and to explore the perception of medical students of their learning environment so that problem areas can be identified both at the institutional and curriculum level. Methods DREEM tool was circulate to all willing participants from first to final year MBBS students. data was collected and analyzed using recent SPSS software. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values. one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was calculated, and p < 0.05 was considered to be significant. Results An overall score of 111.76 (55.88%) out of 200 was obtained indicating ‘more positive than negative’. The overall mean score was 2.21 ± 0.58, which is interpreted as ‘educational aspect that could be enhanced’. Out of five domains, students’ perception of teachers scored maximum (57.95%) rating while students’ social self-perception scored the least (49.35%). The relationship between students and domain is insignificant for teachers, academic, and sociality (p-value = 0.088, 0.290, and 0.30) but significant for learning and atmosphere (p-value = 0.039 and 0.018) Conclusions Overall institute is propagating in right direction but as per feedback obtained by students, it seems that there is decline in quality of medical education with increase in number of medical colleges. There is urgent need of training and retraining of teachers and DREEM scoring survey should be adopted in all medical colleges as annual scoring system so that level of medical education could be elevated. Trial registration: CTRI/2020/07/026665 [Registered on: 17/07/2020] - Trial Registered Prospectively