Patients Encounter as a Motivating Factor for Academic Performance in a Medical Neuroscience Course

Background: The integration of patient encounters into the first year of the medical school curriculum is known to be of vital importance in the development of critical thinking and communication skills. We investigated whether exposure of first year medical students to patient encounters during a first year medical school neuroscience course result in a high level of motivation associated with the clinical encounter, and whether this high level of motivation translates to higher academic performance as measured by their performance on formative and summative examinations.

Methods: First year medical students interacted with patients presenting with different neurological disorders in a small group informal session. Following the small group interactions with patients, students participated in a large group debriefing session involving discussions with peers, biomedical sciences faculty, and clinicians. Students then completed a survey designed to assess their motivation in correspondence with the Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) model of motivation. These results were then correlated with students' performance in the neuroscience examinations.

Results: The total mean score was high for all categories of the ARCS model of motivation (4.26/5) and was highest for Relevance (4.46/5). When these motivation scores were correlated with students' performance on the formative and summative examinations, a significant positive correlation was found between motivation and performance on both the formative (r = 0.85) and summative (r = 0.95) neuroscience examinations.

Conclusion: Encounters with patients presenting with neurological disorders during a first year medical neuroscience course result in a high level of motivation associated with the clinical encounter, and this was positively correlated with their academic performance.