Learning benefits of Interactive Spaced Education in undergraduate medical students.
Information technology, Medical education, Undergraduate
Interactive Spaced Education (ISE) is a teaching tool consisting of two components: the assessment component, composed of multiple-choice questions and/or short answers, and the educational component, which provides immediate feedback to the student's answer, and a brief explanation of the topic. The aim of this study was to assess the improvement in pulmonology learning of undergraduate students at a university in Northeast Brazil. A randomized trial involving 91 fourth-year medical students was conducted in 2012. After a cognitive pretest with 20 multiple-choice questions, participants were emailed an ISE covering eight topics (smoking, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease-COPD, pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, pleural diseases, lung cancer, respiratory failure) twice a week for 12 weeks. Participants, all of whom were enrolled in the pulmonology discipline, also received the contents by the conventional method. After twelve weeks, the students were submitted to a cognitive posttest identical to the pretest. According to the answer percentage, subjects were divided into two groups: G1 - answered 50% or more ISEs and G2 - answered less than 50%. Statistical analysis compared the mean scores obtained in the two groups using the Mann-Whitney test. The G1 and G2 had 60 and 31 students, respectively. Cognitive knowledge assessed by the pretest was similar between groups. Cognitive performance showed a statistically significant improvement in G1 (7.35 ±1.11) compared to G2 (6.60±1.31), p = 0.015. We concluded that ISE improved the pulmonology learning of fourth-year medical students.