Medical Teachers' Roles from the Students' Perspective: A Moroccan National Survey-based Study.

BACKGROUND: The present study aimed to explore medical students' expectations from their teachers in Moroccan medical schools, regarding their primary educational roles. METHODS: An online questionnaire was distributed to medical students from the five main public medical schools in Morocco using a snowball sampling strategy. RESULTS: Two thousand four hundred and eighteen complete answers were collected and analyzed. The respondents gave the highest scores to "information provider" and the lowest scores to "Planner." When asked about their most preferred role they would want to see in their teachers, 40.6% of the respondents chose "Facilitator." CONCLUSION: These results highlight that Moroccan medical schools should become more invested in training their faculty members to meet the rapidly changing demands and requirements of modern medical education.

Résumé Contexte:La présente étude avait pour objectif d'explorer les attentes des étudiants en médecine vis-à-vis de leurs enseignants dans les facultés de médecine Marocaines, concernant leurs rôles éducatifs primaires.Méthode:Un questionnaire en ligne a été distribué aux étudiants en médecine des cinq plus grandes facultés de médecine publiques au Maroc en utilisant une stratégie d'échantillonnage en boule de neige.Résultats:Deux mille quatre cent dix-huit réponses complètes ont été recueillies et analysées. Les répondants ont attribué les notes les plus élevées au rôle de « fournisseur d'informations ¼ et les notes les plus basses au rôle de « Planificateur ¼. Lorsqu'on leur a demandé quel était le rôle qu'ils préféreraient voir chez leurs enseignants, 40,6 % des répondants avaient choisi "Facilitateur".Conclusion:Ces résultats soulignent que les facultés de médecine marocaines devraient s'investir davantage dans la formation de leurs membres du corps professoral pour répondre aux demandes et aux exigences en évolution rapide de l'enseignement médical moderne.

Knowledge, attitudes, and practice of leadership skills among undergraduate medical students.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Medical knowledge alone is insufficient to provide excellent medical care. Modern healthcare challenges require that all physicians have leadership skills in order to better cooperate and collaborate with other healthcare professionals and effectively lead their teams to provide the best possible care to their patients. The objective of this study was to describe medical students' prior knowledge of leadership concepts, to assess their common practice of its main skills and to explore their general perception of its application by their seniors. METHODS: Non-graduated medical students enrolled in the 5th year of medicine or above were invited to fill-in an anonymous online questionnaire. 267 students (66% women) from different medical faculties took part in the study. RESULTS: 44% of the participants had a vague idea about leadership and 29% were completely ignorant of the concept. 52% of them thought that leadership was not to be expected from medical students, and 65% did not know that leadership in healthcare would benefit the patient. In their responses to simulated situations, the participants presented optimal attitudes embracing leadership attributes regarding self-awareness, receiving feedback, teamwork, stress and conflict management, however they present more contrasting attitudes when it came to time management and questioning oneself. Seniors with good leadership skills were perceived as few by half the participants. CONCLUSIONS: This survey highlighted the need of introducing specific leadership training programs within the curriculum of medical studies in Morocco.

Medical students' contribution to research; the scientific output of medical theses held in Moroccan medical schools during the last decade (2011-2021).

BACKGROUND: In order to obtain their medical degree, medical students in Morocco are required to carry out a research project and provide a thesis outlining its methodology and findings. However, little is known about the scientific output of these theses. The aim of the present study was to explore and evaluate the characteristics and publication patterns in scientific-indexed journals of medical theses written by medical students in Morocco. METHODS: Data was extracted from registered theses between 2011 and 2021 in four medical schools that have an open-source documents archiving platform. Publication of these theses was assessed in 2022 using a search strategy in three indexed databases; Pubmed, Scopus and Web of science. RESULTS: 9807 theses were registered between 2011 and 2021, 41% of them in the faculty of medicine of Rabat. 99.1% of these theses were written in French, 61.7% were reporting a retrospective case series, and 38.9% of them covered surgical disciplines. 83 (0.8%) of the registered theses were published in a scientific-indexed journal, and half of the papers (49.4%) was written in French. The graduate student was the paper's lead author in 54.2% of the papers. The articles driven from the theses were published after a mean delay of 1.49 ± 1.34 years and the targeted journals had a mean SJR score of 0.69 ± 1.21. The total number of detected citations of the 83 published papers was 216. CONCLUSION: The publication rate of Moroccan medical theses is very low when compared to other countries, which leads to question the real benefit of this time and resources consuming educational activity.

Does developing multiple-choice Questions Improve Medical Students' Learning? A Systematic Review.

Practicing Multiple-choice questions is a popular learning method among medical students. While MCQs are commonly used in exams, creating them might provide another opportunity for students to boost their learning. Yet, the effectiveness of student-generated multiple-choice questions in medical education has been questioned. This study aims to verify the effects of student-generated MCQs on medical learning either in terms of students' perceptions or their performance and behavior, as well as define the circumstances that would make this activity more useful to the students. Articles were identified by searching four databases MEDLINE, SCOPUS, Web of Science, and ERIC, as well as scanning references. The titles and abstracts were selected based on a pre-established eligibility criterion, and the methodological quality of articles included was assessed using the MERSQI scoring system. Eight hundred and eighty-four papers were identified. Eleven papers were retained after abstract and title screening, and 6 articles were recovered from cross-referencing, making it 17 articles in the end. The mean MERSQI score was 10.42. Most studies showed a positive impact of developing MCQs on medical students' learning in terms of both perception and performance. Few articles in the literature examined the influence of student-generated MCQs on medical students learning. Amid some concerns about time and needed effort, writing multiple-choice questions as a learning method appears to be a useful process for improving medical students' learning.

Distant education in Moroccan medical schools following COVID-19 outbreak at the early phase of lockdown: Were the students really engaged?

The Coronavirus pandemic outbreak has induced many urgent adaptation measures in Morocco including medical education that had to abruptly adopt an exclusive distant education approach, without former sufficient preparation. The present study aimed to assess medical students' engagement in their acutely implemented distant learning and to identify factors that could be associated to the students' studying engagement levels. Medical students from 1st to 5th years of medical studies, enrolled in all Moroccan public medical faculties were invited to fill-in an anonymous online questionnaire. 3174 medical students took part in the study, with a mean age of 20.4 +/- 1.8 years old, and 65.4% of them were women. 90% of the participants reported moderate to drastic change of their sleeping habits and 65% suffered depression symptoms. 20.7% of students didn't engage at all in their learning, 26% studied for less than one hour daily, and only 53.3% studied for one hour or more daily. Only 46.4% of the participants had access to multimedia studying resources and only 20.9% were offered online interactive sessions with their teachers. 41.8% of the participants were unsatisfied from their distant learning experience. Lower studying engagement rates were significantly associated with older age, male gender, change of sleeping patterns, depression symptoms, and also with lack of access to multimedia studying resources and poor general satisfaction from the distant learning experience. Distant Education needs to include more interactive activities and more multimedia studying resources to engage students more efficiently in their self-regulated learning.