Relationship between academic performance and affective changes during the first year at medical school

Abstract

Background: Entering medical school may be associated with changes in the students’ life, which can affect academic motivation and impair academic performance.

Aims: This work aimed at measuring longitudinally academic motivation, anxiety, depression and social adjustment in first-year medical students and determining the relationships between these variables and academic performance, as measured mainly by grades on regular exams.

Methods: Eighty-five first-year medical students (age: 17–25 years) were included after giving informed consent. Beck's Anxiety (BAI) and Beck's Depression (BDI) Inventories, the self-reported Social Adjustment Scale (SAS-SR) and the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) were applied two months after admission and at the end of the academic year.

Results: BAI scores increased throughout the year (7.3 ± 6.6 versus 28.8 ± 6.7; p < 0.001), whereas BDI scores did not change (6.8 ± 5.9 versus 6.0 ± 5.4; p > 0.10). SAS-SR subscales scores remained stable, except for a decreasing pattern for leisure/social life (1.8 ± 0.4 versus 2.1 ± 0.4; p < 0.001). AMS scores for motivation to know (22.2 ± 4.5 versus 19.7 ± 5.5; p < 0.001), to accomplish things to know (17.7 ± 5.3 versus 15.4 ± 5.3; p = 0.001), to experience to know (18.2 ± 5.2 versus 15.4 ± 5.4; p < 0.001) and by identification to know (23.5 ± 3.5 versus 21.8 ± 5.0; p = 0.002) decreased significantly. There were no significant correlations between academic performance and the global scores for any of the scales except for the SAS-SR subscale for academic life (r = − 0.48, p < 0.001).

Conclusions: Throughout the academic year, first-year medical students showed increased anxiety, decreased academic motivation and a maladjusted leisure/social life, which however does not seem to affect academic achievement.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alaor Oliveira, Helena Esper and Mariana Scaranti for their support in the conception and design of the study and in the acquisition of the data.

This study was supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, throughout the ‘Programa de Educação Tutorial do Ministério da Educação’ (PET/MEC).

FM, MM, TLR and FPV were supported by scholarship from the ‘Programa de Educação Tutorial do Ministério da Educação’ (PET/MEC). CMDB and LEAT are supported by research fellowships from the ‘Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico’ (CNPq).

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.