Trajectories of learning approaches during a full medical curriculum: impact on clinical learning outcomes.

Background: No consensus exists on whether medical students develop towards more deep (DA) or surface learning approaches (SA) during medical training and how this impacts learning outcomes. We investigated whether subgroups with different trajectories of learning approaches in a medical students' population show different long-term learning outcomes.

Methods: Person-oriented growth curve analyses on a prospective cohort of 269 medical students (M=21years, 59 % females) traced subgroups according to their longitudinal DA/SA profile across academic years 1, 2, 3 and 5.