Personalizing Medical Education for a Healthier World

Abstract

Background: People have different motivation to study medicine. According to Self-Determination Theory, we could give autonomous support to achieve the internal motivation which is the high quality of motivation. We encourage students to write their smart goals as one of the activities in medical literacy class. The smart goals are visualized through dream boards. The clearer the goal, the easier a student to achieve their goals and increase their level of motivation. Summary of Work: We aimed to increase students’ motivation to learn medicine and encourage them to make their dream board. This activity is part of a medical literacy class where new students are introduced to study strategies, reflection, and the usage of digitalization in the future. One of the activities is to make a SMART goal. We encourage them to make their future career dream board as a visualization of SMART goals. Then they filled out the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) questionnaire to measure increased motivation. Summary of Results: Based on the IMI questionnaire reports, there was increased autonomous motivation measured with the IMI questionnaire. 83% of students said the activities were valuable, with a score range of 5 to 7 on the Likert scale, and 74% of the students stated this was interesting, with a score range of 5 to 7 on the Likert scale. Those two components of value and interest are indicators of increased self- motivation. Discussion and Conclusion: Though students were motivated, they still needed guidance regarding their future careers. Answering this issue, the ideal solution could be mentoring or coaching with the advisory lecturer or peer mentor. Those activities could nurture the motivation. Additionally, the dream boards showed that most medical students wanted to become specialists. Only a few people want to practice as general practitioners. This phenomenon is troublesome because the GP, as a primary health care provider, should be the priority. Therefore, it can be continued as a future study