Academic leagues and medical training: validation of an instrument for student assessment and perception

Abstract:

Introduction:

The Medical Curriculum Guidelines (2014) encourage the use of methodologies that prioritise the active participation of students in knowledge construction and integration between the different course contents, ensuring the inseparability of teaching, research and outreach programs, where the Academic Leagues (AL) is one of those strategies.

Objective:

To validate an instrument to assess the contribution of AL in the process of medical education through student perception.

Method:

This is a methodological study, which involved content validation through the steps of constructing the questionnaire and submission to a committee of judges, which enabled the rectification and inclusion of items, in addition to assessing the degree of agreement between the specialists. Therefore, internal consistency was analyzed by applying the instrument in a pilot group, under the test-retest method, analyzing linguistic clarity, reliability and temporal reproducibility.

Results:

The initial proposal consisted of an instrument with 14 items, grouped in four dimensions. Responding to the expert committee’s review, the instrument was restructured and statements added. Through the content validity index, two sentences were excluded, resulting in 19 statement. In the first application in the pilot group, the students’ understanding of all the items prevailed, with the Cronbach’s α coefficient reaching 0.829. For analysis of the temporal stability, the intra and inter-class correlation coefficients confirmed the excellent reproducibility of the instrument. Finally, it was possible to qualify the contribution of the AL through the stratification of the mean scores of the instrument.

Conclusions:

The questionnaire to assess the contribution of AL in the medical education process is a valid and reliable instrument.

Keywords:
Validation Study; Curriculum; Medical Education