Understanding external study resource use among medical students
Authors: Peters Cara , Harris David 
Published: May 2023

Introduction: As medical advances continue, so does the knowledge base necessary for medical students. This has resulted in medical students turning to external resources to help with efficiency and understanding of lecture material. External resources include any educational material not affiliated with the student’s medical school. Due to the fast-paced changes in the number of external resources available to medical students, there is a misalignment between how students are using these resources and how faculty may be able to incorporate them into their teaching. The aim of this study is to help close that knowledge gap between students and instructors to aid in faculty evaluation of external resources for classroom use. Methods: Between June and October of 2022, 14 medical students from the class of 2025 at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The first topic explored motivators behind external resource use and the second topic explored how students feel these resources affect the role of faculty. Interviews were conducted virtually over Zoom and transcripts were analyzed by conducting thematic analysis with an inductive approach using NVivo. Major themes were identified and relationships between themes were analyzed to better understand these topics. Results: Four major themes resonated across interviews. One theme was that students felt conflicted about how faculty viewed student external resource use. They thought that while some professors likely view external resources positively since they aid in comprehension of lecture material, others might view these resources as threatening to their role as educators. The second theme was that external resources containing video lectures tended to be used to enhance students’ understanding of classroom material rather than as a replacement for in-house lecture material. Another theme was that students tended to use different resources depending on which course they were in. They attributed this to courses being taught by professors with different teaching styles as well as the variable nature of the material between courses. The final theme was that students were overwhelmed with the number of resources available to them. This resulted in them identifying lack of time and money as being major barriers to experimenting with different resources. Conclusions: Most interviewees in this study had a positive perspective on external resources and expressed a desire for them to be incorporated into classroom use. Students’ conflicted feelings on how faculty view these resources should be explored more in the future by conducting similar interviews with faculty. A major limitation of this study is its lack of generalizability as this was a qualitative study with a small sample size from a single medical school. Therefore, the themes in this study should be further explored with survey studies to quantify the prevalence of these attitudes. UCF College of Medicine FIRE Project Funds 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.