Abstract. Learning anatomy in the University of Oulu: Influential factors to success during 2010–2017. Our research covers population of 1398 students from eight different medical and dental courses. We collected exam results from 21 anatomic and 14 histologic practical works and combined them with students’ background information received from the student register of our medical and dental faculties. The background information included students’ name, gender, year of birth, hometown, starting year of medical/dental studies, programme and previous degrees. This research was performed in priority to find possible connections and correlations between the practical work results and the background data. The main purpose was to see if the increasing group sizes have affected on academic performance.
We executed statistical analysis by using nonparametric tests Mann-Whitney U-test and Kruskal-Willis’ test for the distributional analysis and for the correlations we used Spearman’s correlation coefficient while our result data was not normally distributed (tested with Kolmogorov-Smirnov). The program we used was IBM SPSS Statistics 22.
We found no correlation between the annual student population and the practical work exam results so the increasing group sizes has not affected on academic performance. A good performance in the histologic practical works correlated significantly with similar performance in the anatomic practical works (ρ = 0.409, p <0.001). Female students managed better in the histologic practical works (ρ = 0.103, p < 0.001) but in anatomic practical works there was statistically significant difference between genders. The dentistry students performed inferiorly compared to medical students: histology (ρ = -0.194, p < 0.001) and anatomy (ρ = -0.193, p < 0.001). According to our research the students who are 25–30 years old females studying medicine are going to have the strongest academic performance (histology: ρ = 0.232, p = 0.009; anatomy: ρ = 0.236, p = 0.008) in the anatomy course while the male students of dentistry are receiving the worst results
