Students' evaluation indicators of the curriculum

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine indicators and methods that the allied health students use for evaluating the curriculum quality and teaching. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted. Questionnaires were developed and administered. A total of 383 students at the Nanjing Medical University participated in the first round to identify initial indicators. A total of 41 medical educators ranked the identified factors in order to construct the questionnaire for evaluating the curriculum. A total of 2148 students completed the questionnaire in the second round. To evaluate the psychometric properties of the questionnaire, factor analysis and the reliability coefficient were used. Results: The initial indicators yielded in factor analysis constituted 16 factors in the first round and were reduced to 10 by medical educators with an internal consistency reliability of 0.79. The correlation coefficients of 10 indicators were found to be less than 0.45 with an average of 0.27. Students valued the autonomous learning ability as a key indicator for teaching and learning (r = 0.65; p < 0.0005). Conclusions: The result shows that the identified indicators are valid and reliable to measure the quality of the curriculum. The importance Chinese students placed on autonomous learning may suggest new initiatives to new curriculum.