Theodore E. Woodward Award: spare me the PowerPoint and bring back the medical textbook.
A tutorial for 4(th) year medical students revealed absent long-term retention of microbiology and infectious disease facts taught during the 2(nd) year. Students were suffering from the Ziegarnik effect, the loss of memory after completion of a task. PowerPoint lectures and PowerPoint notes combined with multiple-choice questions may have encouraged this outcome; this teaching format was also associated with minimal use of the course textbook. During the subsequent year, active learning techniques, Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) and Peer Instruction (PI) were used, and instructors specifically taught from the textbook. Essays and short answer questions were combined with multiple-choice questions to encourage understanding and recall. Performance on the National Board Shelf exam improved from the 59(th) percentile (2002-2004) to the 83(rd) percentile (2005), and textbook use increased from 1.6% to 79%. This experience demonstrates that strategies incorporating active learning and textbook use correlate with striking improvement in medical student performance.
Department of Medicine, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA. southfs@medicine.ufl.edu
Frederick S
FS
Southwick
D001363:Awards and Prizes; D015510:Clinical Medicine; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction / Q000639:trends; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D012958:Societies, Scientific; D012984:Software; D013663:Teaching / Q000639:trends; D013782:Textbooks as Topic; D014481:United States