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.