ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Healthcare Professions Education
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1636277
This article is part of the Research TopicInsights in Healthcare Professions Education: 2025View all 5 articles
Do Students' Attitudes toward Required Readings and Servicelearning for a Medical Humanities Course Predict their Perception of Whether the Course Fosters their Personal and Professional Development?
Provisionally accepted
- 1Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia
- 2Rocky Vista University, Parker, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
To determine whether prospective medical students' attitudes toward readings and servicelearning for a Medical Humanities course predict their perceived impact of the course on their critical reflection and empathy for their peers.Methods: Following a Medical Humanities course, students completed surveys concerning their attitudes toward team-based service-learning and readings required for the course. And they completed surveys designed to measure their empathy for one another and thoughts and feelings about the course (e.g., "owing to this course, I have changed the way I look at myself" = critical reflection).Results: Students' positive attitudes toward service-learning and readings for the course correlated positively with each other and with their critical reflection (CR) and empathy for their peers (r = 0.28 to 0.63, p < 0.05 to 0.0001).Positive attitudes toward team-based service-learning predicted students' perceptions of the Humanities course's impact on both critical reflection and peer empathy, whereas attitudes toward required readings played a significantly lesser role.
Keywords: team-based learning, service-learning, Professional Development, Implicit biases, listening, compassion, critical reflection, Empathy
Received: 27 May 2025; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rogers and Van Winkle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lon J Van Winkle, Rocky Vista University, Parker, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.