Correlation between Educational Performance and Communication Skills of Jahrom Medical Teachers

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Communication skills (verbal and non verbal) are one of the importantce factors for effective teaching. In this study we decided to determine the correlation between communication skills and educational performance of Jahrom medical teachers from students’ viewpoint.METHODS: This cross sectional study was performed on 181 medical and nursing students of Jahrom university of medical sciences and their point of view about 30 teachers were gathered. In this study two different questionnaires were designed to measure the communication skills and educational performance of paramedical sciences and nursing teachers. The first questionnaire was used to measure teachers’ communication skills and the second one was used for their educational performance. Validity of the questionnaires approved by getting experts’ opinion and reliability was determined by split half method in a pilot study. After classified information, the result of teacher evaluation by students compared with mean scores of teacher communication skills. Every faculty member achieving more than two-thirds of score in each questionnaire would be considered as a desirable education performance and communication skills.FINDINGS: From all, 151 (83.5%) of students were female and 30 (16.5%) of students were male. In whole, from students’ viewpoint 78 % of teachers have good communication skills and 22% of them have not these skills well. Educational performance of 83.3% of teachers was desirable and 16.7% of teachers haven’t good educational performance. Correlation coefficient between educational performance and communication skills was 0.84% (p