Introduction: The Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) is an instrument that assesses the educational environment.
Aim: The aim of this study was to psychometrically evaluate a Polish version of the DREEM instrument.
Material and methods: 203 medical students who fully completed the DREEM questionnaire were included in the study. Validity was evaluated through the analysis of construct validity and reliability.
Results: After language validation the internal consistency was assessed. Cronbach's alpha for the overall score was 0.93 and the five subscales were: perceptions of learning 0.86, perceptions of teachers 0.82, perceptions of atmosphere 0.75, academic self-perceptions 0.61, and social-self perceptions 0.61. The exploratory factor analyses, however, yielded dimensions that did not fully correspond to the original DREEM subscales.
Conclusions: Internal consistency of the Polish version of the DREEM scale as a whole was excellent, however for each of five originally developed subscales it was lower and vary a lot; construct validity of Polish version was not compatible with the original structure of the DREEM scale but was reasonable. A new five-factor solution obtained in this study could be a reliable tool for assessing the medical education environment in the Polish circumstances, but it will require confirmation in future study.
Keywords: DREEM; educational environment; reliability; validity.