If You Build It, Will They Come? Exploring the Impact of Medical Student Engagement on Clerkship Curriculum Outcomes

Inconsistent or superficial access to workplace learning experiences can impede medical students' development. Well-designed clerkship curricula provide comprehensive education by offering developmental opportunities in and out of the workplace, explicitly linked to competency objectives. Questions remain about how students engage with clerkship curriculum offerings and how this affects their achievement. This study investigated student engagement as the source of an apparent clerkship curriculum malfunction: increasing rate of substandard summative clinical competency exam (SCCX) performance over 3 years following curriculum reform.

We sampled from three cohorts of US medical students (classes of 2018-2020) based on their post-clerkship SCCX performance: substandard (N = 33) vs. exemplary (N = 31). Using a conceptually based, locally developed rubric, a five-person team rated students' engagement in a curriculum offering designed to provide standardized deliberate practice on the clerkship's competency objectives. We examined the association between engagement and SCCX performance, taking prior academic performance into account.

Rate of substandard SCCX performance could not be explained by cohort differences in prior academic performance. Student engagement differed across cohorts and was significantly associated with SCCX performance. However, engagement did not meaningfully predict individual students' SCCX performance, particularly in light of prior academic performance.

Engagement with a particular learning opportunity may not affect clerkship outcomes, but may reflect students' priorities when navigating curricular offerings, personal learning goals, and curriculum policy. Proposing four patterns of engagement in clerkship learning, this study prompts reflection on the complex interaction among factors that affect engagement and outcomes.