Abstract:

Khalifa University College of Medicine and Health Sciences (CMHS) is the first medical school developed in the city of Abu Dhabi and the first 4 tier post baccalaureate MD program in the UAE. Recently, our 4th cohort of students have commenced their journey toward becoming physicians.

Medical schools admit a diverse student body. While pre-admission aptitude predicts success in medical school, despite meeting these criteria, many students who commence medical school perform poorly or fail when faced with the rigors of the first-year curriculum. Several studies have reported the relationship between learning and study strategies to academic achievement. The Learning and Study Skills Inventory (LASSI) can be employed to assess students’ strategic learning which underpins information processing, test strategies, motivation, anxiety, and self-regulatory tools i.e., self-testing, concentration, time management and the ability to employ other academic resources to enrich understanding and depth. Delivering workshops on study skills which include presenting the best ways to learn and retain information are a wonderful introduction to medical school. However, whether students implement the tried and tested tools is difficult to determine. The ideal is for our students to use these tools and persist with using them to the point where they reap the benefits which could be enhanced performance in an exam and/or long-term retention of facts supporting improved student performance and retention in the program. The challenge is how to we measure this longitudinally?

Transitions is a module delivered to medical students before their first preclinical module Molecules, Genes and Cells (MDBS 601). Students are assessed using LASSI during Transitions and this is followed up with a series of “Learning to Learn” workshops. Students are required to develop SMART goals for the first two weeks of MDBS 601. Students map out their study schedule incorporating the tools they learned, and they reflect on this. They are encouraged to discuss how they plan to study, manage work life balance, anxiety, challenges they may have with concentration, how they self-test etc. In parallel, study skills i.e., retention, self-testing, active recall presented in Transitions are incorporated into the teaching of MDBS 601. Material presented in class is tested frequently and students are engaged in active recall and interleaving activities to promote long term retention. Students reflect on their performance in their first assessment. They re-review their SMART goals and plan for the following two weeks of the course where the 2nd high stakes exam takes place. This continues to the end of the course. To support students through this first academic course, in parallel top up sessions to review study skills are offered in addition to peer tutoring to address the difficulties students present with in their reflections. To assess the effectiveness of this 6-week program, we examined performance in MDBS 601 and a post LASSI to determine if study skills had changed. Follow up focus groups enabled a deeper understanding of how study habits evolved, what worked, what was tried and if implementation and reflection had influenced this change.

Keywords:

Self-regulation, study strategies, teaching and learning, cognitive load.