Students Teaching Students: A Novel Solution for Teaching Procedures via Instruction on the Corpse

Increased faculty and resident responsibilities have led to the decreased time available for teaching clinical skills to medical students. Numerous advances in education and simulation have attempted to obviate this problem; however, documented success is lacking. Our objective was to describe a novel fresh cadaver-based, student-driven procedural skills lab and to compare the educational effectiveness of student instructors to the senior instructor (SI).

This was a prospective study performed at an academic medical center. A pilot program, "Students Teaching Students," was introduced where four trained first-year medical students (TMS) instructed 41 other untrained first-year medical students in technical procedures. This study compared the teaching evaluations of the SI with the TMS teaching equivalent procedures. Paired t-test was used to determine statistically significant changes in procedural confidence between pre- and post-training. Utilizing a post-training questionnaire, average post-training confidence improvement values and objective post-training test scores of the participants were compared between TMS and SI, using a 2 sample t-test. Statistical significance was considered as a P-value<0.05. All statistical analyses were conducted in Stata 11 (StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA).

Twenty-nine out of 39 (74%) students completed the questionnaire. Both groups demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in subjective confidence level in performing each procedure when pre- and post-training scores were compared, while there was no statistically significant difference found in cognitive knowledge between the groups (p=0.73). There was no statistically significant difference in the mean confidence improvement between the SI and TMS groups for chest tube insertion (2.06 versus 1.92 respectively, p=0.587), femoral line placement (2.00 versus 1.94 respectively, p=.734) or student test score (88% versus 85% respectively).

Our results demonstrate that first-year medical students well-trained in technical skills, such as our TMS, may be a valuable additional teaching resource. The Students Teaching Students procedure lab employed in this study was effective at immediately increasing first-year medical students' confidence and technical skill. First-year medical students well-trained in technical skills, such as our TMS, may be a valuable additional teaching resource.