Model Analysis of Influencing Factors on Academic Performance of Medical Students

Abstract

A questionnaire was designed according to the UTAUT model. Students from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, including undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students, participated the survey. A total of 221 completed responses were received within one month, and 218 responses were used for quantitative analysis (deletion of 3 invalid responses). This study found that academic performance of medical students was influenced most by learning willingness, followed by facilitating conditions, self-management of learning, etc. The results of this study can be helpful to students and teachers in medical college to adjust their learning and teaching strategies. Introduction Academic performance is an important index to reflect the mastery degree of theory and skills of students in their learning process. To improve the students’ academic performance, there is a need to study what factors influence the academic performance, and in what degree are the influence of these factors. Up to date, the factors that influence academic performance of medical students had not been systematically analyzed. UTAUT (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) model was proposed by Venkatesh [1] based on eight existing models. In this model, four constructs play a significant role as direct or indirect determinants of behavioral intention and usage behavior: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. And four moderators provide theoretical justification for the hypotheses: gender, age, voluntariness, and experience. The UTAUT model has been used by many scholars in the field of education. For example, Tan [2] used UTAUT to explored Taiwanese college students’ needs for English E-learning websites, concluded that performance expectations, effort expectancy, and social influence had positive effects on behavior intentions and facilitating conditions. Au et al. [3] described a simplified adaptation of the UTAUT model to study factors that affect behavioral intention to use reminders for study habit alteration, the evidence is statistically significant that e-mail reminders can help students acquire new study habits. Through the discussion of above literatures, we may conclude that UTAUT model can be considered applicable to the study in the educational field. Therefore, in this paper, a UTAUT model was used to systematically explore the factors that influence academic performance.