14 - Interventions Based on “near Peer” Insights to Improve Medical Histology Exam Scores

Poster Board Number: 14
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Abstract Body : Introduction: First year medical students often struggle with how to prepare for the first Medical Histology exam, resulting in a first exam score significantly below 70% and a great deal of stress as they attempt to raise their course grade. Rather than relying on a “teacher knows best approach” to helping students get off to a strong start, we surveyed previous medical histology tutors to get “near-peer” insight on developing and implementing supplemental materials that would proactively provide students with guidance on effective study strategies specific to the Medical Histology course. We predicted that this would result in improved exam performance and fewer failures on the first Medical Histology exam.
Materials & Methods: Student tutors from the 2021 Medical Histology course were asked to complete an anonymous survey, administered through Qualtrics, to get their perspective on what previous students struggled with during the course and what materials tutors thought would have been most helpful to struggling students. Feedback obtained through the survey was used to create additional resources including advice on when to begin preparing for the exam, side by side comparison images and more practice questions, to help students understand how exam questions will be formatted and identify weaknesses in their study plan. These new resources were presented during lecture and were available for students to download after class. Success of the interventions was assessed through comparison of aggregate class data from the 2021 and 2022 courses (before and after implementing the supplemental materials).
Results: In 2021, 111 of 416 students failed the first Medical Histology exam (26.86%), with an exam mean of 79.39%. Following the introduction of supplemental materials to the Medical Histology course in 2022, 60 of 429 students failed exam 1 (13.99%), with an exam mean of 81.86%. Compared to 2021, the 2022 exam results show a significant 2.47% increase in the mean exam score (p< 0.01), and the percent of students failing exam 1 decreased by 12.87%. Additionally, students who downloaded the supplemental materials had significantly higher exam scores compared to students who did not (difference of means 3.839 ± 1.468, P< 0.01, two tailed t test, mean scores 82.06% vs 78.22%).
Conclusion: Histology course tutors may be an underappreciated “near-peer” resource for developing supplemental course materials to improve student exam performance. Here we show that student use of the supplemental materials prior to exam 1 in 2022 correlated with significantly higher mean exam scores and a reduced number of first exam failures compared to the 2021 exam 1 results.
Significance: In past years, most efforts to improve student performance on the first Medical Histology exam were instructor driven ideas (“teacher knows best”). Here, we surveyed previous medical histology tutors to get “near-peer” insight on where students struggle on the first exam, and what advice and additional resources would be most beneficial to students preparing for the first exam. This approach significantly increased exam 1 scores and reduced the number of students failing exam 1. We believe this approach can be applied to many courses in medical school, to improve student success.