Perspectives on Self-Directed Learning — the Importance of Attitudes and Skills

The use of Self-Directed Learning (SDL) as a learning tool is increasing in today’s educational environment, especially in medical schools. We wanted to examine whether all students are effective self directed learners and can make use of this learning tool to achieve learning objectives. Students (n = 125) of first-year medical training program were selected and for a period of 10 weeks they were exposed to two types of teaching programs i.e. SDL sessions and regular didactic lectures. Based on the total scores they obtained in the examination that followed they were divided into four groups. The results showed that the students of higher-scoring groups had scored significantly higher in SDL topics when compared with didactic lecture topics (75.28 ± 7.85 vs. 65.56 ± 3.93, and 67.29 ± 9.37 vs. 57.23 ± 4.51, respectively). In contrast the students in the lower-scoring groups did not score significantly higher in the SDL topics. This suggests that SDL may help “good” students to understand concepts and score well, but weak students may not benefit as they may be lacking the appropriate cognitive skills. SDL an be a very good method to make students to learn, but it should be adopted in a systemic manner keeping in mind heterogeneity of students with respect to skills.