gms | German Medical Science

Background: Spacing of teaching sessions may provide the learner with more opportunities to elaborate and process learning contents. Hence, distributing a certain amount of teaching hours over a longer time period (spaced format) may result in better learning than delivering the same amount within a shorter time period (compressed format). We wanted to evaluate this effect for an emergency medicine block course (EM-BC) on students’ procedural knowledge.

Summary of work: In the fifth year of an undergraduate medical curriculum an EM-BC of 26 teaching hours was delivered either within 3 days, or 4.5 days. At the end of the course students’ procedural knowledge was assessed by a specifically developed video-based electronic key-feature test.

Results: From 191 eligible students 156 data sets could be completely evaluated, 54 students from the spaced version, and 102 students from the compressed version. Socio-demographic characteristics and drop out rates were similar between groups.

In the key-feature-test with a possible maximum score of 22 points students from the spaced format reached a median of 15 points (13–16; 25.–75. percentile), and students from the compressed format reached 13.5 points (12–15); Cronbach’s alpha was 0.63. The observed difference was 8.5% of the median test score, being highly significant (p=0.002) at a moderate effect size (Cohens d=0.53).

Conclusions: A spaced distribution of teaching hours resulted in a moderate increase of procedural knowledge if compared to a compressed distribution. Spacing of teaching units may produce moderate gains in cognitive learning [1].