Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Tıp Eğitimi Dünyası, cilt.24, sa.73, ss.57-69, 2025 (Hakemli Dergi)
Background: Professional values continue to develop throughout medical education as a result of the individual's own internal evaluations during identity development as well as their engagement with the educational environment. Identity development processes, capacity for reflection, and perception of the clinical learning climate have an important role in shaping these values. The aim of this study is to reveal the relationship between personality development processes, reflection capacities, perception of learning climate, and professional values of clinical students.
Methods: Medical students in clinical term (n=681) with a mean age of 22.86 (Sd=1.48) were evaluated for their personality development processes, self-reflection and insight capacities, perception of learning climate, and professional values. The students filled in the valid and reliable scales related to the mentioned variables by themselves after obtaining their consent. In addition to descriptive statistics, linear regression and mediation analyses were performed with Jamovi 2.3.21 to predict professional values. The study was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and local ethics committee permission was obtained.
Results: Insight and engagement in self-reflection significantly differentiated by grade and females had higher scores for given importance to professional values than males. Except for the emotion dimension, the clinical environment was perceived more positively by juniors than senior students. Perception of learning climate as motivating and exploration- in-depth dimension scores from personality processes positively predicted professional values. The motivator effect of the learning climate has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between exploration-in depth and given importance to professional values.
Conclusions: Research on medical students’ professional values should be designed holistically to evaluate individual and environmental factors together. Medical education should focus on both practices that will encourage personality development processes, increase people's capacity for reflection and evaluation, and improve the clinical learning environment. In this regard, it is important to include practices within the educational programs that specifically target reflection on clinical education experiences as a competency and to inform faculty members about the effects of the learning environment on students' professional value development.