An online guided e-journal exercise in pre-clerkship years: oxidative phosphorylation in brown adipose tissue

The rationale for this mandatory, guided online e-journal exercise is to foster the ability of students to independently read medical and scientific literature in a critical manner and to integrate journal reading with their basic science knowledge. After a lecture on oxidative phosphorylation, students were assigned to read an article on brown adipose tissue published in New England Journal of Medicine and were guided to analyze the article by answering online questions. After two iterations, student surveys about the project, its key pedagogical features, and ways to improve it suggest that the students perceived these exercises as active learning, which is clinically relevant and built on their course material. Furthermore, students agreed that the e-journal project was useful for learning how to read an article, for reviewing the material learned in class, and for promoting evidence-based medicine. This online e-journal exercise models some aspects students will experience as future physicians, where it is essential to keep up with literature and extract relevant information on a tight physician's schedule. This study demonstrated the usefulness of guided e-journal exercises as a simple effective active teaching tool for preclinical medical students, which can also be used for prehealth undergraduate programs.