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Objectives: Undergraduate medical students experience a considerable amount of stress and anxiety due to frequent exams. The goal of the present study was to examine the development of exam related anxiety and to test for a correlation between anxiety and learning approaches.
Methods: A whole class of 212 medical students was invited to participate in the study. During their first term, trait anxiety and learning approaches were assessed by use of the state-trait-anxiety inventory (STAI-T) and the approaches-and-study-skills-inventory-for-students (ASSIST), respectively. Acute state anxiety was assessed twice in the course of the second term. To that extent, the STAI-S in combination with measuring salivary cortisol were employed immediately before two oral anatomy exams.
Results: Our most important results were that a surface learning approach correlated significantly with anxiety as a trait and that students with a predominantly strategic approach to learning were the least anxious yet academically most successful.
Conclusion: As surface learners are at risk of being academically less successful and because anxiety is a prerequisite for burn-out, we suggest that medical faculties place particular emphasis on conveying strategies for both, coping with stress and successful learning.
Cipra C, Müller-Hilke B. Testing anxiety in undergraduate medical students and its correlation with different learning approaches. PLoS One. 2019;14(3):e0210130. Published 2019 Mar 13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210130.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Sections of the Abstract, Introduction, and Discussion are presented in the Podcast. Link to full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6415780/
