Attitudes and demands on medical statistical education during the COVID-19 pandemic among undergraduates-postgraduates-teachers: A cross-sectional study in eastern China

Abstract

Global coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic leads to the soaring demand for medical statistical applications, bringing a great challenge to medical education at universities worldwide. The purpose of our study is to investigate medical students and teachers attitudes and demands on statistical software education. A multi-city cross-sectional study was conducted in 2021 at medical universities in eastern China. Students and teachers were surveyed through online electronic questionnaires. We collected information on each participant attitudes and demands on medical statistical software usage experience. A total of 895 responses were collected using a validated questionnaire. Most students showed great interest in learning medical statistical software (undergraduates 91.9% vs post-graduates 97.8%, P < .01), thought that statistical software was important (undergraduates 99.2% vs post-graduates 94.7%, P < .01), highly relied on using the SPSS (undergraduates 52.9 % vs post-graduates 77.6%, P < .01) and R package, and felt difficulty in learning statistical software (undergraduates 82.7% vs post-graduates 98.4%, P < .01). Among teachers, the most commonly used statistical software was SPSS (91.2%), followed by the R package. Notably, very few students and teachers thought “Statistical software met needs” (from 21.8% of undergraduates to 8.8% of teachers). There were 75.4% of post-graduates and 96.5% of teachers who thought it was necessary for a university to offer an advanced statistical software curriculum such as the R package in the preferred teaching format of offline class as well as the combination of theory and software practice teaching. This study for the first time demonstrated that most medical undergraduates, post-graduates, and teachers in Anhui Province of eastern China were not satisfied with statistical software usage experience, calling for prompt adjustments to statistical software education in medical universities.