Enhancing medical student neuroscience training with a team-based learning curriculum
Objective:
To assess the effects of a transition to clinician-educators and active learning in a pre-clinical neuropathology curriculum.
Background:
Neurophobia, the fear of and dislike of clinical neurology, is frequently due to poor experiences in pre-clinical neuroscience education. Methods to mitigate neurophobia include increasing active learning, engaging clinicians, and demonstrating clinical relevance.
Design/Methods:
We identified an under-performing neuropathology curriculum within a second-year medical student neuroscience course and implemented a traditional team-based learning curriculum to deliver this content. In addition, we transitioned to primarily clinician-led lectures. We assessed student opinions of the curricular changes through end-of-course feedback, a novel survey, and semi-structured interviews with students. We assessed outcomes on course examinations and overall course performance, comparing performance in the pre-implementation phase (2020-2021) to the post-implementation phase (2021-2022) using a two-sample t-test.
Results:
Student opinions of the curricular changes were positive on the end-of-course evaluation (79.4% rated team-based learning as good or excellent) and novel survey (89-96% of students rated the portions of the curriculum positively). Themes identified in qualitative analysis included an appreciation of streamlined course content and a sense that the sessions within the curriculum reinforced learning. Student performance on the final examination was similar in the pre-implementation vs post-implementation phases (81.2% correct vs 80.3% correct; p=0.37). Performance on the neuropathology subsection of the final examination was also similar (82.6% correct vs 83.9% correct; p=0.36).
Conclusions:
We demonstrate the feasibility and utility of a transition to neurologist and neurosurgeon-led lectures and the implementation of a team-based learning curriculum within a neuroscience course. While we report data from implementation at a single center, these results have relevance to other courses given our demonstration that team-based learning is a useful method to deliver neuroscience learning, non-pathologist lecturers can effectively provide neuropathology education, and a small number of educational faculty can be engaged to deliver this material.