Outstanding qualities of a successful role model in medical education: Students and professors' points of view.

Introduction: Role models play a crucial role in determining the professional development of medical trainees. The purpose of this study was to gain in-depth understanding of the outstanding qualities of successful role models. Material and methods: In this qualitative-descriptive study, data were collected through conducting interviews, and the inductive content analysis was performed. The study was done at the school of medicine of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Twenty-five medical students, medical graduates, and faculty members participated in 25 interviews from April to December 2019. The participants were recruited via purposive sampling. Results: five categories and 13 subcategories were extracted from the data. The results of this study illustrated five crucial qualities of a good clinical role model including an excellent character, effective coach and mentor, inspiring medical leader, expert clinical teacher, and a professional physician. Our results also highlighted the lasting effects of positive role modeling of clinical teachers on medical trainees' professional careers. Another category in the present study was connected to future consequences of being a role model in a clinical setting. Conclusion: The result of this study illustrated crucial qualities of a good medical role model. This result can assist the leaders to engage with medical educators to better understand the process of role modeling and design the best plan for development of role modeling in medical education.

Factors related to academic failure in preclinical medical education: A systematic review.

INTRODUCTION: Identifying the learners' problems early enough and providing advice from the beginning is definitely an important investment in the training and progress of future practitioners. The current review aimed at examining factors related to academic failure of the preclinical medical students. METHODS: The study was carried out as a systematic search of publications in the following databases published from January 1987 to January 2018: PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Educational Resources, Information Center and Scopus. No language limitation was set for searching the resources. As a comprehensive search, the following keywords were used for the abstract, title and keyword sections: academic performance, academic failure, academic achievement, drop out, academic engagement, learning disorder, medical student, struggle student and problem learner. A valid tool (STROBE) was used to determine the quality of the articles. RESULTS: Most articles discussed personal causes, 7 discussed learning style, 7 discussed personality traits, 6 discussed motivational strategies and self-efficacy, 4 discussed quality of sleep, 4 discussed the effect of stress, 9 discussed demographic factors, 3 discussed physical activity, 1 discussed coping strategies, 2 discussed class attendance and 4 discussed study strategy. Twenty-five articles described instructional design cause, 3 described teaching strategies, 2 described course assessments, 1 described the course structure, 3 described critical thinking, 3 described blended learning, 13 described predictive courses, 14 described admission tests, 1 described the learning environment, 2 described curriculum planning and 3 described the pre-matriculation program. CONCLUSION: Medical teachers often do not know which students are problem learners or what causes academic failure. The goal of this systematic review was to determine the origin of problems in learning to identify problem learners. The results indicates that managers, policymakers, instructors and counselors can monitor student academic achievement by careful planning of instructional design, attention to an educational environment, use of active teaching methods, continuous assessment of students and consideration of personal factors.