Medical students’ attitudes towards group and self-regulated learning

Objectives: The study is aimed at exploring the association between beginning students’ attitudes towards group learning and their awareness of learning strategies, to demographic variables and their exposure to problem-based or mixed curricula. Methods: The descriptive cross-sectional design included students (N = 351) from two medical schools with lecturebased and two with problem-based curricula from Germany and Sweden. Gender, age, personal and parents’ practice experience within health care were assessed. A questionnaire was designed for measuring attitudes towards group and individual learning, awareness of learning strategies was assessed with the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. The t-test for independent groups was applied to compare dependent variables between personal factors, and multivariate statistics to compare medical schools. Results: Students’ personal work experience correlated with self-regulation (t(333) = -3.307; p = 0.001) and group learning experience (t(341) = -2.971; p = 0.003). Students from the German problem-based curriculum reported most experience with group learning (largest mean difference compared to the German lecture-based curriculum = 1.45 on a Likert scale from 1 to 7; SE = 0.181; p < 0.001), and were better at regulating their learning strategies than students from the Swedish lecture-based school (mean difference 0.18; SE = 0.181; p = 0.034). Conclusions: Students’ clinical experience seemed to benefit self-regulation skills. Problem-based teaching methods and early interprofessional education appear to be favorable learning conditions for the development of professional skills.