Relations Between Medical Students' Motivational Persistence Skills and Their Acceptance of Specific Blended Learning...

The concept of blended education, which refers to the intensive integration of digital resources into the teaching process and its mixed online and on-site delivery, combining as much as possible the advantages of both methods in an optimal way, is becoming increasingly popular among teaching tools. There is no universal recipe for designing a successful blended course; the success of such courses is measured entirely through their degree of acceptance among students, defined by their emotional motivation to learn and the obtained practical results. Our study aimed to evaluate the motivational persistence degree (MPS) of medical students in connection with the students' acceptance of different didactic tools involved in blended-learning approaches. Materials and Method: We investigated a sample comprising 523 students in Dental Medicine or General Medicine, belonging to all years of study, from four main Universities in Romania; we classified them according to their motivational persistence profile (using k-means data clustering) and we comparatively investigated the main relevant features of students in each cluster-gender, age group, opinions about the general usefulness of multimedia resources in the learning process, and their degree of acceptance of specific types of instructional materials involved in blended learning. Results: We found that the students who mostly enjoy the traditional learning style have average motivational persistence skills; they are perseverant and competitive, but they are not so good at planning their daily tasks. They enjoy external directions, set by teachers. The students who most enjoy PowerPoint presentations and those who enjoy instructional videos show similar behavior, both belonging to the cluster with the highest MPS score. They have the best motivational persistence skills amongst all categories; they are particularly excellent at planning and fulfilling daily tasks, as well as following their goals in the long term. The students who mostly enjoy online documentary sources belong also to a cluster with above average MPS score; they excel in fulfilling daily tasks, but exhibit weaker performance in recalling unachieved goals. These results are similar to those already reported in the literature; the strength of our study is in that it provides much more specific evaluations oriented to the motivational persistence degree, which is highly significant in the case of medical students, because it is a measure of their commitment in fulfilling certain tasks. Conclusions: Our results have the potential to highlight reasons for academic success or failure according to a student' s profile, and will prove helpful in selecting the most appropriate didactic tools.