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RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VERBAL UNDERSTANDING AND MENTAL SKILLS IN UNIVERSITY
Authors: Aurora Sierra Canto, Janet Carolina Negrón Espadas y Jorge Armando Argáez Sosa
Number of views: 279
Introduction. University students face an academic context of demands and challenges. For this reason they need to mobilize and strengthen the physical, psychological, cognitive, social, economic resources that students have at the beginning of their academic career. The student of the Bachelor of Nursing must develop solid skills in scientific knowledge and humanistic training. Objective. Analyze the relationship between verbal comprehension and mental abilities: spatial comprehension, reasoning, number management and verbal fluency in university students. Method. A quantitative, cross-sectional, analytical study was performed. 102 new students enrolled in the Nursing Degree participated. The sample was not probabilistic for convenience, consisting of 102 students. The results of the Primary Mental Skills Test of L.L Thurstone and T.G. Thurstone, whose reliability is 0.87. Analysis. A descriptive analysis was performed and Pearson's correlation between the study variables was estimated. In addition, the corresponding hypothesis tests were performed to assess the significance of the correlations. Results. It was found that verbal comprehension is significantly and directly related to spatial comprehension (r = 0.22, p <0.022), reasoning (r = 0.30, p = 0.002), number management (r = 0.29, p = 0.003) and verbal fluency (r = 0.19, p = 0.044). Conclusion. Due to the finding of the difficulties that students present with respect to their levels in mental abilities, the implementation of a leveling course in mental skills with emphasis on reasoning and number management is recommended.