Enhancing Generic Skills Through Active Learning: A Quantitative Analysis of Fourth-Year Medical Students at Medical Education Elective Block

Healthcare professionals should excel not only in academics but also in generic skills to provide high-quality care. Diverse active learning approaches are strongly believed to enhance generic skills development; however, studies supporting it are limited, particularly in Asia. This quasi-experimental quantitative study, using a one-group pre-test post-test design, aimed to determine the impact of thoughtfully designed active learning approaches, such as project-based learning, flipped classrooms and mentoring, used in the medical education (ME) elective block on generic skills development of fourth-year medical students at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Jakarta. Thirty-five of 36 students admitted to the ME elective block and who completed the Indonesian adaptation of the generic skills self-assessment questionnaire were included and then randomly divided into four groups. The questionnaire has six domains: analytical, perseverance, teamwork, communication, social judgement and global abstraction. Data was analysed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, performed using IBM SPSS version 22. Social judgement skills had the lowest score (Mdnpre = 3.00, IQRpre = 1.50; Mdnpost = 3.00, IQRpost = 2.25), and teamwork skills had the highest score (Mdnpre = 4.00, IQRpre = 0.93; Mdnpost = 4.48, IQRpost = 0.64). However, the most significant improvement was observed in analytical skills (Mdnpre = 3.22, IQRpre = 1.06; Mdnpost = 4.00, IQRpost = 0.89). While improvements were observed in all domains, improvements in participants’ analytical, perseverance, teamwork, communication and global abstraction skills were more significant (p < 0.05), suggesting the effectiveness of the employed learning approaches in facilitating the medical students’ generic skills development.