Interactive review sessions using polling provide real-time formative feedback and faculty-modeled MCQ practice in pre-clerkship medical school courses: evolution through a major curricular revision
Authors: Petre Sullivan Rebecca 
Published: May 2023

The Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University annually welcomes a class of 220 students to the MD program across two campuses. Our goal is to create an interactive, collaborative, and comparable experience, and to promote deeper levels of learning for learners with diverse background experiences. A challenge with large class sizes is providing valuable feedback as to which concepts students struggle with and to address learners’ misconceptions. Faculty obtain most feedback from summative assessments. Participation in pre-exam review sessions, including lecture-style and Q&A reviews, has declined. Facilitators seek methods to provide meaningful review of many topics while increasing buy-in and engagement of our students. We hypothesized that by using a more scaffolded active learning approach, we could increase the participation in and value of these sessions. Five years ago, we piloted a format which incorporated case-based learning with real-time formative assessment using polling in Echo360. Goals were to increase student engagement in the large class setting and to offer students and faculty real-time insight into students’ conceptual understanding. Faculty designed sessions to build on cases previously introduced in lectures/workshops to integrate structure-function relationships of disease, allowing faculty to address big picture, high-yield concepts while modeling how to differentiate disease states and approach board-style multiple choice questions. Sessions have since been continuously revised to focus on core basic science content and case-based questions in three courses covering the cardiovascular, pulmonary, and renal systems. This contributed to the development of the new courses which resulted from the shift from a two-pass pre-clerkship curriculum to a single-pass curriculum which began in the Fall 2020 semester. The format allows for integration and spaced repetition of content and core concepts which carry through the systems-based component of the curriculum. The new curriculum also resulted in an increase in the number of board-style questions in curricular summative exams. Students appreciate how much material can be covered in a meaningful way, that they can practice board-style MCQ questions and cases with immediate faculty feedback, and that they can refine their study plan and improve time management in their exam preparation. Faculty note that students who attend are enthusiastic and ask thoughtful follow-up questions and appreciate that they can quickly identify challenging topics for further discussion and review. The percentage of students who attend these optional sessions has markedly increased from the more passive sessions used in the past. In addition, this format allows students and faculty to attend virtually using Zoom, which allows for faculty across both campuses to work together with students in real-time. Both students and faculty support the use of these interactive review sessions. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.