A step out of the dark: improving the sleep medicine knowledge of trainees

Over 40-million Americans are undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or untreated for sleep disorders. Despite the growing need to integrate sleep medicine knowledge into the medical education curriculum, educational leaders have struggled to incorporate contemporary medical topics such as sleep medicine into the already packed curricula. We set out to examine the efficacy of an online, self-paced, sleep medicine learning module as an educational tool for medical students.

We studied 87 Johns Hopkins medical students. Participants were randomly assigned to the sham module (SM, n=40) or learning module (LM, n=47). The efficacy of the tool was assessed based on changes in performance (pre- and post-module completion) on a validated sleep knowledge questionnaire (the Dartmouth Sleep Knowledge and Attitude Survey).

Improvement in overall sleep knowledge, as measured by the Dartmouth Sleep Knowledge and Attitude Survey, was significantly higher in the LM group compared to the SM group (F(1,84)=9.71, p<.01, η(2)=0.10). Although the SM group's improvement was significantly lower than the LM group, within-subject comparisons did show improvement from their pre- to post-assessment scores as well.

A self-paced learning module is an effective educational tool for delivering sleep medicine knowledge to medical students.