A Study on the Level of Learners' Readiness for Learning from the View Point of B.S. Students in Isfahan Medical University in 2001

Introduction. One of the basic human activities is learning and education. Indeed the role of education is to facilitate learning but many internal or external factors affect the learning process such as learners’ physical, affective and mental readiness. If we don’t pay attention to these factors, they will lead to a superficial learning and finally the trained and graduated students won't be efficient enough. If we determine the factors affecting students' readiness for learning, we will be able to adopt a proper strategy for teaching. Therefore this research was planned to determine the level of learners’ readiness for learning according to B.S. students and also to determine its correlation with some of their demographic characteristics. Methods. This research was a cross-sectional survey. The research samples consisted of 298 B.S. students from four schools including: Health, Nursing and Midwifery, Management & Informatics and Rehabilitation, selected based on simple stratified sampling. The tool for collecting data was a questionnaire whose validity and reliability were determined by content validity and test re-test respectively. Descriptive analytic statistics was used for data analysis. Results. The mean score of physical, affective and mental readiness for learning in four schools were calculated. Although a significant difference was observed for some factors related to learners' readiness between the schools, but ANOVA didn’t show a significant difference between the mean score of physical readiness, affective readiness and mental readiness in four schools. Also, other tests including Mann-Whitney, students t test, ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient showed a significant relationship between participants’ characteristics and their readiness for learning. Conclusion. Students' physical readiness is more affected by life conditions while affective and mental readiness has to be under special consideration by people in charge of medical education. Holding talking sessions with students, supervising educational programs and improving faculty members' performance can facilitate students' learning.