A study to assess the perceptions of educational environment among students and faculty in a medical college

Educational environment is physical, social and psychological context in which studentlearn. This definitely affects student’s academic success, achievements, motivation to learn. 1–6 There is aneed to identify effect, strengths and weakness of current educational environment.Objectives: To compare perception of educational environment among students and teachers on DundeeReady Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) questionnaire. To find out strengths and weakness ofthe educational environment.Materials and Methods: Cross sectional, Questionnaire based. students 2nd-9th semester. (N=500,Age–18-25yr) Teaching staffs from all departments(N=100) After institutional ethical committee clearanceand written informed consent DREEM questionnaire given which encompasses five subscales.Statistical Analysis: For all domains. Parametric tests- mean + SD. t-test used for comparison of studentand teachers on each category. P value of 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Non-parametric testused Mann-Whitney test.Results: The educational environment scores were 135.38+15.41 (67.69%) for the teachers and127.77+12.82 (62.81%) for the students (Pfor the subscales were perception of Learning, perception of teachers and perception of Atmosphere andnon-significant were for Academic self-perception and for Social Self-perception.Conclusions: Teachers and students both perceive the educational environment positively but in subscalesteachers perceived it more positive and acceptable. The strengths were knowledgeable teachers, havinggood friends, confident about passing and Weakness identified by students were memorize which may bedue to traditional teacher centred curriculum.Keywords: Dreem questionnaire, Educational environment, Perception.