No abstract

Failure in Medical School is preventable through early intervention. However predicting who is vulnerable to failure is challenging. The ability to predict academic success among medical students has powerful implications for the student, the school they attend and society as a whole. We hypothesized that the level of intrinsic motivation predicts academic success in our cardio‐respiratory physiology course. To test this hypothesis, we administered the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, a multidimensional measurement device developed by Deci and Ryan (1991), to assess our students' intrinsic motivation. Since we have recently shown that gender influences intrinsic motivation for undergraduate students, we also examined if this relationship exists for a larger cohort of medical students. Results indicate that intrinsic motivation is predictive of academic success for male students. In contrast, this relationship did not exist for female students. We conclude that intrinsic motivation can be used as a factor to predict academic success for male but not female medical students.