Group learning improves case analysis in veterinary medicine

Group learning has become important to professional students in the healing sciences. Groups share factual and procedural resources to enhance their performances.

We investigated the extent to which students analyzing case-based evaluations as teams acquired an immediate performance advantage relative to those analyzing them as individuals and the extent to which group work on one problem led to better performance by individual students on related problems. We blinded written evaluations by randomly assigning numbers to groups of students and using removable tracers. Differences between groups and individuals were evaluated using Student's t statistic. Similar comparisons were evaluated by meta-analysis to determine overall trends.

Students who analyzed evaluations as a group had an 8.5% performance advantage over those who analyzed them as individuals. When evaluations were divided into those asking questions related to treatment, differential diagnosis, and prognosis, specific performance advantages for groups relative to individuals were 8.9%, 5.9%, and 6.1% respectively. Students who had previously been trained by group evaluations had a 1.5% advantage relative to those who received their training as individuals.

Answers by students analyzing evaluations as groups suggested a deeper understanding, in large part because of their improved ability to explain treatment and to conduct differential diagnosis. These improvements suggested limited abilities to use previous experience to improve present performance.