The effects of high school curriculum adjustments on physics learning among Taiwanese medical university students

Currently, the teaching of general physics is not unified among medical universities. Due to changes in the senior high school curriculum guidelines and reduction in physics course hours, there have been difficulties in teaching general physics in medical universities. In the current study, the scores on general physics examinations of 248 medical university students during the period 2015-2017 were analyzed. Moreover, the performances of these students on different units were investigated. From the results, differences in scores on unit 4 (electricity) were relatively large and the performance of female students surpassed that of male students. These results may be related to the following factors: First, natural science content has been reduced in senior high school curricula. Second, some students received early admission to medical university. Third, the examination questions were based on examples and practice tests given in class.