Comparing a spaced format of an emergency medicine block course with a compressed format in their impact on students’ test scores in a key-feature test

摘要

Background: Spacing of teaching sessions may provide the learner with more opportunities to elaborate and process learning contents. Hence, distributing a certain amount of teaching hours over a longer time period (spaced format) may result in better learning than delivering the same amount within a shorter time period (compressed format). We wanted to evaluate this effect for an emergency medicine block course (EM-BC) on students’ procedural knowledge. Summary of work: In the fifth year of an undergraduate medical curriculum an EM-BC of 26 teaching hours was delivered either within 3 days, or 4.5 days. At the end of the course students’ procedural knowledge was assessed by a specifically developed video-based electronic key-feature test. Summary of results: From 191 eligible students 156 data sets could be completely evaluated, 54 students from the spaced version, and 102 students from the compressed version. Socio-demographic characteristics and drop out rates were similar between groups. In the key-feature-test with a possible maximum score of 22 points students from the spaced format reached a median of 14,8 points (13-16; 25.-75. percentile), and students from the compressed format reached 13.6 points (12-15); Cronbach’s alpha was 0.63. The observed difference was highly significant (p = 0.002) at a moderate effect size (Cohens d = 0.53). Conclusions: A spaced distribution of teaching hours resulted in a moderate increase of procedural knowledge if compared to a compressed distribution.