Bridging the Gap between Chemistry and Medicine to Improve Medical Students’ Engagement and Learning Outcomes in General Chemistry

The construction of competency-oriented medical education emphasizes the cross-fertilization of medicine and multidisciplinarity. Chemistry is an indispensable part of the knowledge structure for medical students. However, disjointed and abstract General Chemistry (GC) courses often fail to effectively meet the needs of new medical education developments, resulting in low learning motivation and poor student outcomes. The GC course at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine aims to address these issues of integrating chemistry and medicine by developing medical contexts with a chemical background, including clinical diseases, fundamental medical knowledge, historical medical facts, endogenous substances and essential nutrients, drugs, and poisons, and the medical application of chemical techniques. By tracking teaching data in 2020, 2021, and 2023, student-centered strategies including online-offline blended teaching and cooperative learning were employed to improve learning performance (74.6%,77.1%,80.2%) and group work grades (74.4%, 81.8%, 86.5%), indicating better understanding and application of chemical knowledge to medical issues. The trends in submission rates of assignments (68.6%, 76.4%, 80.3%) and frequency of course resource utilization (0.39, 1.24, 1.53) demonstrated promoted student engagement and resource effectiveness, leading to improved learning outcomes. The course-end survey results showed that the curriculum reform positively impacted medical students’ beliefs and attitudes toward learning chemistry. Conclusively, enhancing the medical relevance and bridging the gap between chemistry and medicine appear to be feasible strategies for improving the GC course for medical students.