Assessment of medical student’s attitude towards didactic theory lectures taken in microbiology from a private medical college in south India

Introduction: The attitude of medical students towards the proficiency of teachers and their teaching skills is very influential and has changed over a period of time. Periodic Self-evaluation of faculty to improve teaching is pivotal to roughly know where we academically stand. This study is mainly capacitated to know, analyze about the teaching skills of the Microbiology department faculty from the students point of view. Aim of the study: To evaluate the attitude of second year medical students towards the teaching principles of a faculty during his microbiology didactic lectures for a period of two months. Materials and Methods: A total of 142 second year medical students were involved as study participants. The study was conducted as a prospective epidemiological study for duration of three months and a properly structured feedback assessment tool in the form of a questionnaire was given to be duly filled by the subjects to assess the attitude of second year medical students towards their teachers exclusively on their overall teaching methods and skills. A Five-level Likert’s criteria (Table 1) were used to analyze a few questions in the questionnaire. A set criterion for determining student’s attitude towards faculty (Table 2) was in IBM SPSS 20.0 version software, followed by tabulation of results and interpretation. Results: A total of 142 Second year MBBS students were involved in the study but only 110 out of 142 (78%) gave informed written consent and expressed their willingness to undertake the questionnaire. The sex distribution in terms of male and female ratio was 0.69. Nearly 76% (101/110) of the students had revealed that they are treated as adults by the faculty. Around 89% of the students were satisfied with the faculties teaching skills and 78% were satisfied with motivation skills of the faculty. Only 80% of the students agreed for the good quality of content presented by the faculty during the lecture class. Conclusion: This is a novel study conducted for the first time in this part of southern India targeting medical student’s attitude towards the efficiency of a teaching faculty. To conclude, faculty of Microbiology department had utilized the essential elements of a theory class in terms of content, language, teaching material used, inspiring students and imparting knowledge. The overall attitude of medical students towards the teaching faculty taking didactic lectures was good but continuous monitoring of faculty and student performance by means of periodic assessments is mandatory.