Educational Environment for Undergraduate Medicine and Nursing Programme at Eastern University, Sri Lanka; Students’ Perceptions

Educational environment directly influences the learning process and allows the students to pay more attention on learning. This study was aimed to assess the students' perceptions on the educational environment at Faculty of Health-Care Sciences, Eastern University, Sri Lanka (FHCS, EUSL). This survey was performed on academic year 2014/2015 with the use of Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) questionnaire. 156 (114 Medical & 42 Nursing) students participated. The scores of perception statements were converted into continuous variables and summarized as means. T-test was used to compare students’ perception between programme of study. The results revealed that as per the DREEM analysis, the learning was perceived more positive (27/48), the teaching was moving in the right direction (24/44) and the academic self-perceptions was felt more on the positive side (19/32). However, there were many issues in atmosphere (24/48) and the social self-perception was also not too bad (16/28). The overall DREEM mean score was 111 out of 200, which indicates that there was a more positive educational environment than negative in FHCS, EUSL. Furthermore, students identified problems with regard to the supportive system when they got stressed and relax learning atmosphere during lecture & tutorial. Hence, the faculty needs to identify strategies to improve weaker areas which were identified in the study. Subsequent studies should be conducted in future to assess the results of the corrective strategies and further exploration.