How much of the paediatric core curriculum do medical students remember?

Abstract

Few educational studies have investigated how well information learned by medical students is retained over time. The primary aim of this study was to investigate how much of the paediatric core curriculum undergraduates remembered a year after originally passing their paediatrics examination. In addition, we looked at whether students' repeat performance is related to their approach to learning. Medical students were presented with 8 out of a possible 46 core curriculum short answer questions (Mark 1). A year later these same students were re-tested, without prior warning, on the same 8 questions (Mark 2) and a further 8 questions (Mark 3) from the bank of 46. The participants also completed the Revised two-factor Study Process Questionnaire to characterise their approach to learning. After a year, students scores had diminished by 51.2 % (95 % CI 48.2-54.2 %, p < 0.0001) from a Mark 1 average of 89.1 % (standard deviation, SD = 9.2 %) to a Mark 2 average of 37.9 % (SD 6.1 %). Students who reported a superficial approach to learning achieved higher scores for mark 1 (4.1 % increase (95 % CI 0.9-7.4 %) per one standard deviation unit increase in Surface Approach score (p = 0.01)). Neither deep nor surface approach to learning significantly predicted performance a year later (Marks 2 and 3). Students had forgotten more than half of the paediatric core curricular content that they had previously proven that they knew for their summative assessment. Adopting either a deep or superficial approach to learning did not predict ability to retain this information a year later.

Unprepared Retesting of First Year Knowledge: How Much Do Second Year Medical Students Remember?

“…The results of Sullivan et al [23] suggest this does not play a major role: students in this study performed similar on questions they had seen before and new questions. Incidentally, our study reinforces this conclusion: in one extended matching question (from Healthy & Diseased Cells) students had to match five one-sentence descriptions of different diseases with the names of these diseases.…”

“…For example, Arzi et al [22] found approximately 53% retention of knowledge of the Periodic Table in high school students after a retention interval of 1 year. Sullivan et al [23] report a reduction of approximately 51% of paediatric knowledge in final year medical students after a retention interval of 1 year. D'Eon [24] tested second year medical students after 10-11 months and found considerably more retention of physiology and immunology knowledge (80%) than neuroanatomy knowledge (47.5%).…”

Evaluation of a Flipped Examination Model Implemented in a Final-Year Undergraduate Pharmacotherapeutics Course

“…9,18 As research into the reliability and validity of the Biggs' R-SPQ-2F has been fairly extensive, this validated instrument was anticipated to serve as a reasonable way to investigate the students' approaches to learning in our study. 18,[19][20][21] In order to evaluate the impact of the flipped examination model and assess any possible changes in the students' attitudes and perceptions of their learning process, the same questionnaire was administered both before and after the . According to the scoring system provided by Biggs, total DA and SA scores were calculated as the sum of all DA scale items and SA scale items, respectively.…”

How can we improve teaching of ECG interpretation skills? Findings from a prospective randomised trial

“…Lastly, various ways to calculate retention and decrement of performance have been described. We decided to define decline as the absolute difference in percent scores as this method is widely used [25,26]. However, analysing our data using alternative formulae and adjusting for performance in the entry exam [27] did not substantially alter our results (data not shown).…”