[Effect of an educational strategy on critical reading among medical students]

We developed an educational intervention aimed at promoting the participation of the undergraduate medical students in the classroom in order to improve critical reading, specifically in the skills of comprehension and interpretation. The study is a quasi-experimental one with basal evaluation, educational intervention, and posintervention evaluation. We included two groups of top medical students with a high school individual grade of 9 or higher (in a scale 0 to 10) designated as A groups (experimental [N = 29] and control [N = 23]), and two groups of students with low grades (7 or less) designated as B groups (experimental [n = 20] and control [n = 16]). The experimental educational intervention consisted of the use of guided housework for text interpretation (individual work) and groupal work in the classroom. The groupal work included a debate and confrontation of viewpoints of the individual work. Comprehension was initially superior to interpretation in all groups; comprehension and interpretation were lower in the B groups compared with the A groups. After the intervention, 97% of the students from the A experimental group showed an improvement in comprehension and 79% improved their interpretation (p < 0.001). Of the students in the B experimental group, 75% showed improvement in comprehension and 90% in interpretation (p < 0.01). There were no significant changes in the students of the control groups. We find that with the use of an appropriate educational intervention, students with low scores have the opportunity to improve their critical reading by gaining skills in comprehension and interpretation.