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Renel Marcelus Jr.

Dr. Guenzel

ENC 1102

3/31/2021

A Rhetorician's View: Rhetorical Analysis

“Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical education: Medical students’

knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding electronic learning'' is a scholarly article published

on PLOS One, a peer-reviewed journal site, and was written by Ahmed Alsoufi, Ali Alsuyihili,

and 19 other people. Ahmed Alsoufi and many of the authors, except a few, are affiliated with

Faculties of Medicine at their respective universities in Libya. Each of the authors play a role in

the creation of this article because of their backgrounds; whether that be data curation, analysis,

or writing/reviewing. Their backgrounds helped them to create this article as they are people who

work for the universities where they collected the data from. On top of that, many of the authors

either work for a medical faculty at a university in Libya or a hospital; this will allow them to ask

the proper questions to the medical students that they will survey as they are familiar with the

medical students’ experiences.

This article was written to “provide an overview of the situation experienced by medical

students during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and

practices of medical students regarding electronic medical education” (Alsoufi, et al.). Their

intended audience was most likely both medical students and university officials. The article is

intended for university officials because includes statistics for medical students’ knowledge,

attitudes, and practices regarding electronic learning. It’s most likely that these statistics can help

university officials to make good changes/accommodations for the education of their medical
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students in Libya. The medical students are an intended audience for this because they’re what

the whole article is about. As for the outside context of the article, Covid-19 has caused “most

medical schools [in Libya to be] suspended” (Alsoufi, et al.). In the source, it is stated that

Libya’s civil war and financial crisis “has affected the country’s infrastructure” (Alsoufi, et al.).

Consequently, Libya’s situation called for the authors to make this article to determine the

situation of their medical students.

The authors of this article do not allow for opinions to be made, just for observations

made by logic. The reason being is because they want to observe the statistics that they conjured

up from their medical students. So anything stated in the article will be considered as fact or

observation in the limits of the Libyan country. Their evidence for their analysis is also

convincing. They surveyed 3,348 valid medical students in Libya making their data credible.

This article was written, reviewed, and edited by 21 different people who have backgrounds that

aid them in the making of this article. It’s also listed as a scholarly article which gives it more

credibility. The authors used an extensive list of statistics to make sure that there were little to no

mistakes in their analysis of the data. One of the many statistics they used was Spearman’s rank

correlation coefficient to understand the relationship of the surveyed medical students’

knowledge to e-learning (Alsoufi, et al.). For more evidence of little to no bias within the article,

they stated in the section listed “funding” under the abstract that “[the] research did not receive

any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Therefore, the funders had no role in study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to

publish, or preparation of the manuscript” (Alsoufi, et al.). They also received ethical approval

“from the Bioethics Committee at the Biotechnology Research Center of Ministry of Higher
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Education and Scientific Research in Libya” and prior consent from the participants of the

survey, appealing to the audience with ethos (Alsoufi, et al.).

This article is structured formally, starting with an abstract that talks about, in summary,

what the article is about. Then it includes the introduction, methods, results, discussion,

supporting information, acknowledgments, and references. The methods and results are a major

component of this article; it also provides more validity to the authors as they discuss how they

achieved their statistics and results. The visual graphs included within the article are very

persuasive as they are used to display the statistics that were gained for the making of this article.

Throughout the article, a Toulmin model of argumentation was being used. Claims are being

made by the authors that Covid-19 has an impact on medical education, whether that be the

medical students’ performance or mental attitude towards the situation. The “grounds” or

evidence for this claim is the survey that they gave to medical students who were willing to

participate. Within that survey, they asked a multitude of things such as their gender, age,

financial status, medical education, experience with online learning, etc. The evidence

“warrants”, or backs up, the claim by quite literally showing the impacts of Covid-19 on medical

students’ education with peer-reviewed statistics. The rebuttal, however, is the fact that the data

is taken from medical students in Libya, where the country is not in a situation that can be

considered normal worldwide. Libya, at the time of the research, was in a civil war and with

political unrest. This caused many problems for the citizens, including the medical students

themselves. Because of this situation, it can be said that this article is not a proper representation

of the impact Covid-19 has on medical education worldwide.

My research project is about Covid-19’s effects on pre-med/medical students and medical

residents. This article can be used in the research project to list out a lot of the negatives and
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positives that a medical student might be going through during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as

not being able to receive proper training for a procedure that’s usually taught in person, etc. The

data from the graphs alone will help to engage many arguments within the research. This source

will, however, not be the primary basis of my research. This is because my research is going to

be based on generalizing the situation for medical students across the world; and the article was

written in Libya, which, as discussed earlier, is going through a civil war and political unrest.

These factors can result in a much different experience for medical students in Libya than what

would be considered the norm for medical students around the world.

Some of the data obtained in the article are the medical students’ “medical education

status during the pandemic, such as their work status, types of educational activities conducted,

how COVID-19 affected their career plan…. [and] a mental health assessment that measured

[their] levels of anxiety and depression” (Alsoufi, et al.). These results will help to provide a

view of the negative or positive effects of Covid-19 on medical students. Furthermore, the article

discusses the results of the data. One of the observations that they made was that “2,879 (86%)

[of medical students] reported that their medical school had suspended clinical training and

laboratory skills training” (Alsoufi, et al.). Although discretion will need to be taken, data such

as this will be provided as evidence to help back up claims of medical students throughout the

world having their training and in-person laboratories suspended within the research project.

Within the discussion of the article, the authors talk about how the medical students “were

concerned about how e-learning could be applied to provide clinical experience, especially in the

final year of medical school, which depends heavily on bedside teaching” (Alsoufi, et al.). They

also talk about the financial and mental states of the students. Most of the information from this

article is very insightful about the impact of Covid-19 on medical students, even if it was data
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taken from Libya during its second civil war. This data can be backed with other sources from

the research paper to provide a proper insight into Covid-19’s impact on medical students.

Work Cited:
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Alsoufi, Ahmed, et al. “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Medical Education:

Medical Students' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Electronic Learning.”
PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242905