Flipping the Classroom in Medical Student Education: Does Priming Work?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Emergency Medicine
• Pediatrics

Background:

• The Emergency Medicine (EM) clerkship at LAC+USC utilizes monthly lectures on pediatric fever and shortness of breath (SOB).
• An educational innovation was implemented to assess if pre-session online video viewing (
• priming
• ) enhances learning compared to traditional lectures.
• Factors influencing video completion rates, such as planned specialty and distribution timing, were also examined.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of pre-clerkship online video modules in enhancing medical student learning on pediatric fever and SOB.
• To identify factors affecting the completion rates of preparatory online educational videos among medical students in an EM clerkship.

Main Methods:

• Medical students were assigned to view either a pediatric fever or SOB video before a didactic session.
• Pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test scores were analyzed for concordant (matched video/test topic) and discordant (mismatched) groups.
• Completion rates were compared based on student's planned specialty (EM-bound vs. non-EM-bound) and the advance notice of video availability (two weeks vs. three days).

Main Results:

• Overall, 64% of students viewed the preparatory videos; EM-bound students had significantly higher completion rates (71.5%) than non-EM-bound students (55.6%).
• Immediate post-test scores showed improvement in both concordant (21.4%) and discordant (15.2%) groups, with no statistically significant difference between them.
• Delayed post-test scores also improved, but the difference between concordant (10.5%) and discordant (16.9%) groups was not statistically significant.

Conclusions:

• While immediate and delayed post-test scores improved, online video "priming" did not demonstrate statistically superior learning outcomes compared to traditional methods in this study.
• Medical student engagement with preparatory materials was higher when students were EM-bound.
• Providing video links two weeks in advance did not significantly increase participation compared to three days' notice.