ABSTRACT
Background: Menstruation is natural physiological processes. Psychosocial and religious taboos around it make it complicated as health issue. Poor menstrual health is not only associated with health and well?being of women, but also reflects on morbidity and mortality patterns of female population. Aim and Objectives: The study aims to assess the effect of a structured lecture on the knowledge and awareness about practices of menstrual health in adolescent girls of urban slum. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among adolescent girls of slum area in Aurangabad city of Maharashtra. Pre-structured Questionnaire to assess the knowledge and practices about menstruation and menstrual hygiene was given. Structured lecture was organized and postlecture questionnaire was taken. Results: 72% were in age group of 10–14 years and mean age of menarche was 12.7 years. Before lecture 64% had poor awareness about hygienic menstrual practices, 24% had fair, 12% had good awareness. But after the lecture, the majority of girls, that is, 56% showed good awareness, 30% had fair while 14% girls still showed the poor awareness. This difference was found statistically significant. The reasons behind the unhygienic practices most commonly quoted were poverty, high cost of sanitary pads, ignorance and lack of privacy. Conclusion: If perception and attitude of adolescent girls toward menstrual hygiene is improved then it will definitely enhance their reproductive health. Moreover, awareness created among them will indirectly affect their mother’s reproductive health and their next female generation as well.
ABSTRACT
Background: Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) or ‘‘items” are frequently used in medical education to assess students’ knowledge at the end of an academic session. However, item analysis has to be done to confirm their excellence. This piece of work was aimed to analyze test items in the subject of Physiology. In view of the fact that item analysis has never been conducted in our physiology department, thus this study was planned to assess the quality of MCQs and construct a viable question bank. Aim and Objectives: To evaluate the quality of MCQs used so as to develop a pool of valid items to update the question bank. Materials and Methods: Total of one hundred 1st year MBBS students were given 40 MCQs. Analysis was done with the item difficulty and item discrimination indices. Results: Difficulty indices (p) of 14 items were easy while about two MCQ were difficult and the remaining 24 of the items were within acceptable range. The discrimination index (DI) (D) for 40 items; one item showed negative discrimination, ten were having poor discrimination, whereas 11 were having excellent discrimination.Nine items were having acceptable, and nine items were having good discrimination. The DI exhibited slight positive correlation with difficulty index (r = 0.1575 P = 0.05). However, it was not statistically significant. Conclusion: The findings show that most of the items were falling in acceptable range of difficulty and discrimination level. It concludes that Item analysis is a very useful and necessary procedure to obtain valid Items from time to time.