Lecturio Pulse │ Evidence-Based Medicine & Teaching


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Dear Dr. ,

As I return from attending an annual review course held by the American College of Cardiology, I was struck how everything discussed had a clear basis in carefully performed research. While an evidence-based approach to the practice of medicine has become accepted as absolute requirement, medical educators have been slow to apply a similar approach to the educational process. Yet there exists a wealth of evidence-based learning strategies which have been studied in classroom settings and reported in the cognitive science literature. As the knowledge base grows exponentially and our students need to learn ever increasing amounts, don't we owe it to them to provide the very best strategies and the tools to apply those strategies? We at Lecturio are committed to helping facilitate this needed transformative process and have dedicated this issue of our newsletter to describing some of the most effective learning strategies and ways to apply them to your teaching process.

We hope you enjoy the issue of our newsletter. As always, we welcome you feedback and suggestions as we believe the best solutions will come as the result of facilitating our users individual experiences.

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The Rise of Evidence-Based Medicine

The last fifty years have witnessed a profound shift in the practice of medicine: From being based on institutional perceptions and experiences passed down by revered teachers unlikely to be questioned by their pupils to a new approach dependent on evidence-based findings. These findings emerged from carefully performed basic science studies, and were validated in clinical trials which now form the basis of nearly all clinical decision making today.

Evidence-Based Teaching

A similar scientific approach to studying which methods or strategies were most effective in the learning process has been recently validated in real-life classroom studies with potentially disturbing results: The way most of us have taught and learned is highly inefficient. The good news in this finding is that it offers a solution for us to provide our present students with significantly better ways to learn the vast amount of information being generated.

Learning Science Put Into Action

Did you know that the doubling rate for knowledge production for 2020 has been estimated to be just 74 days! Just as the effectiveness of medical treatments vastly improved when treatments where directed by evidence-based science, so must we follow a similar approach if we are to adequately prepare our students to be doctors in the 21st century.

The Lecturio platform is presently the leading learning science-based solution available to medical students and educators, and is fully committed to making the learning process as efficient as possible.

We thought it would be helpful for you to know some of the ways learning science is leveraged throughout our platform with:

Spaced Learning

Lecturio's smart spaced repetition algorithm spreads learning opportunities over time to improve knowledge retention. Students have access to over 17,000 delivery-optimized recall questions, while the learning format itself spreads out the topics being studied so that there is space between the study of the same medical concepts.

Interleaving

Lecturio's learning format breaks vast amounts of knowledge down into 'easily digestible' sessions. This enables students to learn more effectively by easily switching between different topics. Doing this helps students learn the similarities and differences between different medical concepts, giving them a holistic and interconnected knowledge base.

Didactics Videos

Lecturio leverages dual coding, which combines verbal and visual representations of the same information, as students learn best when they have multiple representations of the same idea. Learning science also shows that shorter length representations (3-9mins) are important for increasing knowledge retention, which is why Lecturio videos adhere to this optimal timeframe.

Active Retrieval

Quiz questions at the end of each learning unit ensure learner engagement utilizing frequent low-stakes or no-stakes assessments. Furthermore, readiness assessments, briefings and debriefings of active learning formats are supported by assignments with detailed drill-down analytics that bring data-driven leaning to the forefront for every instructor.

More to Explore

We would welcome any suggestions as to new ways to apply evidence-based learning strategies using our platform as we believe the paradigm shift required to make the medical education process more effective will require a group effort. To that end, we believe that data-driven solutions will be the key to improving the educational process, much as they have been in the practice of medicine.

Lecturio's data collection system is highly configurable and we welcome suggestions as to the kind of data collection you would like us to include. We would be pleased to assist in study development and look forward to helping all educators adopt an evidence-based approach to education. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions!