A. Awe1, M. Burger1, A. C. Abrams1, G. Caldito1, Q. Chu1, N. Samra1 1Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center- Shreveport,General Surgery,Shreveport, LA, USA
Introduction:
Recently a direct effort has been made by faculty and residents to explore ideas that effectively help improve resident education in preparing for the ABSITE and ultimately surgical board exams. The idea that our resident education faculty adopted was instead of lecturing with PowerPoint presentations on SCORE curriculum topics a pre-lecture activity (PLA) with high-yield questions and concepts surrounding a topic was used as a tool to teach. This innovative teaching strategy used in the setting of resident protected didactic sessions was birthed from the principles of the cognitive load theory. The idea was created to foster a more enjoyable active learning environment during these weekly 30 minute sessions.
Methods:
This project was designed to analyze the preference of the residents about the new teaching approach with PLA in comparison to the previous teaching style with PowerPoint presentations during our weekly didactic session. Our null hypothesis states the residents would not prefer the PLA approach for our weekly didactic sessions and prefer being lectured using PowerPoint presentations alone. We conducted a four question Likert Scale survey among 27 surgical residents to determine their preference. To analyze the survey results, the one-sided Z-test for a proportion was used to test our research hypothesis. To reject our null hypothesis the proportion of residents who would either “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” to each of the questionnaire items would be greater than 50%.
Results:
All 27 residents completed the survey anonymously. The majority of residents (88.9%) agree or strongly agree that having a PLA was more useful in comparison to using online portal from SCORE to prepare for didactic session. (Z- 4.06, p value <0.001). Additionally, 66.67% of residents strongly agree or agree the discussion of high yield score topics from PLA is more beneficial than a lecture about topic via a PowerPoint presentation. (Z- 1.74, p value <0.041). More than half (55.56%) strongly agree or agree during their independent study using notes from discussion of PLA was more helpful than having a copy of a PowerPoint presentation with a third (33.33%) being undecided and (11.11%) disagreeing or strongly disagreeing (Z- 0.58, p value 0.281). Lastly, 78% of residents want to continue with PLA as opposed to being lectured with PowerPoint presentations alone (Z- 2.89, p value 0.002).
Conclusion:
Using Items 1 to 4 in the Likert Survey completed by the surgical residents we were able to measure a resident’s preference for the use of PLA over the use of lectures using PowerPoint during didactic sessions. Our survey results indicate preference for PLA by more than 50% for Items 1, 2 and 4 with statistically significant p values. We were able to reject our null hypothesis for all items except for Item 3. With these results we see a preference by the residents for PLA to be used to assist with preparing for weekly didactic sessions.