Abstract

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BEHIND VEILS….ARAB WOMEN’S MEDICAL SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT

Tehseen Fatima Ali ,Dr. Ahmed bin Ali Jerah , Dr. Yahya Hobani , Dr. Nouf Abuhadi


Educational environment is defined as everything that happens within the classroom, faculty or university. Motivated learners in supportive environments demonstrate high levels of self-efficacy and performance. The educational environment is therefore decisive in determining the success of medical education. This study recorded female student’s perceptions regarding their learning environment at the newly established Jazan Women's Medical Faculty, in hope of identifying potential strengths and weakness to facilitate creating a conductive pedagogical ethos. Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) was administered to 40 female medical students of 3rd year during 2011. Mean DREEM score was 91.36/ 200. The poorest scores were for Learning (19.28/ 48), Atmosphere(19.83/ 48) and Social (13.10/ 28) domains while best scores were for Teaching (22.80/ 44) and Academic(16.35/ 32) domains. Our score is lower than global DREEM scores of most medical institutions of other countries and lies within league of 'generally poor scores' of majority of contemporary Saudi med-schools despite their ‘grandeur’ infrastructure and ‘amply blessed’ logistics. This is a forewarning that several teaching-learning areas need to improve here. Knowledgeable teachers might not necessarily produce well-informed students if the learning atmosphere is not right. There are factors that go 'beyond' logistics, physical facilities and fiscal status in governing pedagogical environments. We need to probe into existing gaps in social and interpersonal domains; trim and emphasize core content and learning objectives of our curriculum and most importantly, develop our human resources with outreaching and nurturing policy models in order to ensure quality in educational standards and conductivity in environments.