Abstract

Background: The problem of educational decline among the students of Medicine is of so importance and is a phenomenon which can lead to decrease in the effective performance of students. For this reason, the present study has been conducted with the purpose of identifying the levels of educational decline and the factors affecting it among the students of Ardabil Medical University.

Methods: This study is a periodic survey of instance-case type, conducted on all 938 students of Medical University in the academic year of 2007. The sampling was conducted easily and accessibly and the sample volume equals to all the subject people of the survey. Through them, 38 with educational decline and 2 as instances and with any case, 68 people selected on the base of parallelism of their classes. Collecting the data was done through a certain questionnaire including two parts: Demographic questions and the effective factors on educational drop. Statistic methods of ch: Square and Fisher exact Test in SPSS v.13 were used for analyzing the information.

Results: It was found that from all 938 students, 38 had the educational decline and the rate of annually emerging educational drop was 4%. The highest rate of academic failure occurred in the fields of Laboratory Science, Midwifery and Medicine with annually emerging of 0.019%, 11%, and 8.9%. The most effective factors on educational decline included being nonnative (p=0.016), father’s education level (p=0.02), awareness of future job (p=0.01), lack of motivation (p=0.02), and not studying tidy and successively (p=0.008).

Conclusions: Regarding the many effective factors in educational decline, which mainly related to personal and individual problems of students, creating an operational monitoring committee in the way of accepting students during their academic years and also using student counseling for decreasing the rate of educational drop seems necessary.

Key words: Educational Decline, Student, Ardabil University of Medical Sciences