gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: In 2012 we faced the situation that, over the past seven years, our institution’s preclinical students had excelled in the subjects of biochemistry and physiology in the National Medical Licensing Exam, but that their scores in anatomy had steadily declined. There were ready explanations for this, including the retirement of expert teachers and the time point of the dissection course relative to the time of the exam. So, whereas some of our staff did not think our teaching was in need of a remedy, decision makers at our institution thought just that. This problem called for the assessment and development of our anatomy curriculum according to Kern [1]. Specifically, we asked

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which subjects are the weak spots of our students and

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(can we help them overcome these weaknesses.

Methods: We examined the IMPP-provided item data for all multiple-choice questions of our institution’s examinees (2006 to 2013).

Results: Our analysis provided information about the topics in which our students did poorly but it failed to identify the targeted learners (the IMPP did not provide personalized data). Our educational strategy was then to implement a review course just prior to the 2013 exam. This course consisted of three lectures that were open to all exam candidates and that covered precisely the knowledge that some of our students seemed to lack. The evaluation of the 2013 National Medical Licensing Exam showed improved scores of our students in anatomy (79% correct answers compared with an average of 71% in the years 2006 to 2012). The scores in physiology and biochemistry did not vary as much (84% vs. 80% in physiology; 77% vs. 80% in biochemistry).

Discussion/conclusion: Our results show a one-time effect and there are other limitations of our approach (including being unable to identify improvements of individual students or lacking control over variables). Nevertheless, if repeated review courses show a consolidated effect in future exams, we can be cautiously confident – and convince our decision makers – that we have identified and alleviated a weaknesses of our anatomy curriculum using a simple targeted education intervention.