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STAT! Learning – A peer tutoring program designed for the clinical rotation year
Background Peer tutoring has a long history of benefitting student learners while also advancing tutors’ understanding of the presented material. This type of tutoring is widely used in medical schools to help pre-clinical students study challenging material. However, some students find that this type of support is not extended into the clinical phases of medical education.. The aim of this project was to develop a peer-tutoring program tailored to the core clinical phase at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine to support student success during clerkship rotations, on their NBME Subject Examinations, and on the USMLE Step 2 CK exam.
Methods For each of the seven core clerkships (internal medicine, surgery, family medicine, neurology and psychiatry, and obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics), a series of presentations were created by fourth year medical students pursuing the respective specialties. These presentations were created referencing material from a variety of board preparation resources and textbooks. Each presentation was designed to be interactive and utilize a similar format: a case presentation to anchor the topic of interest in a real-world example, followed by high-yield material related to the case, explanation and progression of the clinical case, integration and application of the relevant information presented. The presentations for all clinical disciplines is repeated throughout the year, hosted synchronously on Microsoft Teams in the evenings or weekends to allow students from all clinical campuses to attend without interfering with clinical duties.
Results To date we have successfully run the above-described peer tutoring program for nearly two clerkship blocks with overwhelmingly positive student feedback on post-session surveys. We plan to collect and analyze student performance data at the end of the academic year to assess the effect of peer tutoring attendance on subject exam and usmle step 2CK performance.
Conclusion Moving forward, we hope to expand our program to include a more robust orientation to the program during the Transition to Clerkships Course, workshops to review test-taking strategies, and cumulative review sessions to supplement board examination preparation. Overall, this project should provide a model for peer-tutoring in the clinical phase of medical school, and will likely improve student performance at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.