Conference attendance does not correlate with emergency medicine residency in-training examination scores

The residency review committee for emergency medicine (EM) requires residents to have greater than 70% attendance of educational conferences during residency training, but it is unknown whether attendance improves clinical competence or scores on the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) in-training examination (ITE). This study examined the relationship between conference attendance and ITE scores. The hypothesis was that greater attendance would correlate to a higher examination score.

This was a multi-center retrospective cohort study using conference attendance data and examination results from residents in four large county EM residency training programs. Longitudinal multi-level models, adjusting for training site, U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 score, and sex were used to explore the relationship between conference attendance and in-training examination scores according to year of training. Each year of training was studied, as well as the overall effect of mean attendance as it related to examination score.

Four training sites reported data on 405 residents during 2002 to 2008; 386 residents had sufficient data to analyze. In the multi-level longitudinal models, attendance at conference was not a significant predictor of in-training percentile score (coefficient = 0.005, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.053 to 0.063, p = 0.87). Score on the USMLE Step 1 examination was a strong predictor of ITE score (coefficient = 0.186, 95% CI = 0.155 to 0.217; p < 0.001), as was female sex (coefficient = 2.117, 95% CI = 0.987 to 3.25; p < 0.001).

Greater conference attendance does not correlate with performance on an individual's ITE scores. Conference attendance may represent an important part of EM residency training but perhaps not of ITE performance.