A survey of teaching content mastery, desires and countermeasures of medical statistics

Objective To understand the mastery of content and the desires of medical statistics and put forward suggestions to improve students' ability. Methods Self-designed questionnaire was used to survey the mastery of content and the desires of 220 students in February 2019 in Weifang Medical University. The mastery of content was evaluated by students themselves, the total mastery of content was 100 points, and the mastery of content of each chapter was divided into three grades: unskilled, general and skilled. Results The self-assessment results showed that the percentage of scores distribution at the range of <60, 60~69, 70~79, 80~89, 90~100 were respectively 9.1%(20/220), 30.9%(68/220), 36.4%(80/220), 19.1%(42/220) and 4.5%(10/220). The ratio of proficiency in statistical description was more than 35.0% and the ratio of proficiency in statistical inference was about 20.0%. As the results, 77.3%(170/220) of the students wanted to strengthen the training of statistical logical mapping, and 85.5%(188/220) wanted to strengthen practical application. Conclusions The overall mastery level was general, the statistical description part was better, and the statistical inference part was poorer. According to different professional backgrounds, the teaching mode should be improved, the learning interest need to be raised, the training of statistical concept should be strengthened, and so to improve learning outcome of students. Key words: Medical statistics; Mastery of content; Teaching desires; Countermeasure