TITLE:
Authentic Situations Motivate Medical Students for Dealing with Medical Insurance Issues—A Study of Learning Styles and E-Learning
AUTHORS:
Susanne Nielsen, Kaety Plos, Carina Furaker, Annika Jakobsson
KEYWORDS:
Learning Styles; Medical Students; Attitudes to E-Learning; Medical Insurance Issues
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.3 No.1,
February
22,
2012
ABSTRACT: In this study, e-learning based on authentic situations was used as a pedagogic method to stimulate medical students to reflect over their own learning styles and to prepare them for dealing with medical insurance issues in their future profession. The aim was to explore the learning styles used by the students in a Social medicine course when e-learning, based on authentic situations was used as a pedagogical approach. A learning style questionnaire by Kember, Biggs and Leung, and a course evaluation questionnaire designed by the authors were used. Seventy-seven students answered the questionnaires and the questionnaires were analysed by Mann-Whitney U-test, and Fisher’s test was used as a pair comparison. One hundred forty comments made by the students were analysed using content analysis. The results showed that: 69% of the students regarded e-learning as a very good/good pedagogical method to study medical insurance. Men had a significantly higher rate of surface learning than women. A majority of the students thought that it was positive to take part of peer students’ assignments but they highlighted the risk of plagiarism and cheating. The students made use of the flexibility in this type of learning which suited their lifestyle.