[Design of a real and perceived academic workload measurement instrument for health care undergraduate students]

A high academic workload may have adverse consequences among university students.

To design and validate an instrument to measure both real and perceived academic workload for health care students.

The questionnaire was designed based on a bibliographic revision and the conduction of two focus groups conformed by undergraduate students from a Faculty of Medicine. Afterwards, it was submitted to qualitative pre-tests. The final instrument consists of a self-applied questionnaire with both a characterization section (10 questions) and one concerning academic workload by subject and semester (five and two questions, respectively). A national and international panel of 14 experts evaluated the survey content's validity. The analysis was performed according to the Content Validity Ratio and the Content Validity Index.

The complete instrument was validated with an 84% consensus between the judges. Each section of the instrument was approved separately with a 77% and a 94% agreement, respectively. After being individually analyzed by the judges, each question was validated. The wording of questions was improved taking the experts comments into consideration.

The proposed instrument constitutes a contribution for the measurement of real and perceived academic workload for students.