Materials and Methods: A total of 324 undergraduate preclinical (year 2) and clinical (year 3-5) medical students participated in this study. The research design used thematic analysis of an open-ended questionnaire to analyze the qualitative data.
Results: The thematic analysis detected five major emergent themes: lack of remembering (18.2%), lack of understanding (28.4%), difficulty in applying (3.6%), difficulty in analysis (15.1%), and difficulty in interpretation (17.8%), of which addressing these challenges could be taken as a foundation step upon which medical educators put an emphasis on in order to improve ECG teaching and learning.
Conclusion: Negative attitude toward ECG learning poses a serious threat to acquire competency in ECG interpretation skill. The concept of student's memorizing ECG is not a correct approach; instead, understanding the concept and vector analysis is an elementary key for mastering ECG interpretation skill. The finding of this study sheds light into a better understanding of medical students' deficient points of ECG learning in parallel with taxonomy of cognitive domain and enables the medical teachers to come up with effective and innovative strategies for innovative ECG learning in an undergraduate medical curriculum.