Students' Perspectives on Clinical Education environment in a Military Medical University

The educational environment has an important effect on students' learning and their learning activities. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the students' views on clinical education environment in Aja university of medical sciences.

In this cross- sectional descriptive analytic study, the climate governing the educational environment was measured using the Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) standard questionnaire. The research population was all the students of the clinical training course of Aja University of Medical Sciences in 2022. Sampling was done by proportional stratified method and randomly in each stratum. Data analysis was done through descriptive and inferential statistical tests using SPSS.

The results showed that the average of the total educational climate is 3.19 ± 0.50, which indicates a relatively favorable situation. The highest average score of students' perception was 3.42 ± 0.65 related to the area of students' perception of their academic ability and the lowest average score was related to students' perception of learning with an average of 2.97 ± 0.60. There was no significant relationship between the gender variable and students' perception of the educational atmosphere (P< 0.05). In addition, the results showed that there is a significant relationship between the GPA variable of students and their perceptions of the overall environment of clinical education (P=0.002). There was significant relationship between the variable of school and students' perception of clinical education environment (P= 0.010).

The atmosphere of clinical education from the perspective of the students in this study was relatively favorable. Improvement is needed to have a better quality educational environment, and future qualitative studies are recommended to confirm and deeply understand this finding.