Sonia Osorio; Alejandro Rodríguez & Janneth Zúñiga

The learning of human gross anatomy (HGA) is essential for health professionals, as it is key to achieve diagnoses and carry out clinical procedures safely and effectively. It is essential to recognize the main ideas of human anatomy, such as anatomical position and planimetry, and terms of reference and comparison, to understand the general characteristics of the structures, systems, and functions of the human body. However, the academic performance of students in the course of HGA is low, so this study aimed to determine the relationship between sociodemographic data and their academic performance. For this purpose, students of the academic program of Medicine and Surgery enrolled in a HGA course were surveyed on 17 sociodemographic factors. The grades obtained by the students in the three exams taken in the course were recorded and correlated with the answers obtained in the questionnaire. In order to know the students' characteristics and behaviors in each of the variables, descriptive statistics were performed for each of them, the t- student test was used to compare the means of each group. In the event of behavior far from the normal distribution, the non-parametric tests of Mann-Whitney U and Kolmogorov-Smirnov were used. It was found that factors like previous academic university experience, retaking the HGA course, students’ health condition, working and studying at the same time and the students’ mother's level of education influence in their academic performance.

KEY WORDS: Human Gross Anatomy; Sociodemographic factors; Higher education students; Teaching; Learning.

OSORIO, S.; RODRÍGUEZ, A. & ZÚÑIGA, J. Sociodemographic factors and academic performance of medicine and surgery students in a course of gross human anatomy. Int. J. Morphol., 41(5):1372-1381, 2023.