Differences in Self-expression Reflect Formal Evaluation in a Fourth-year Emergency Medicine Clerkship
Introduction: Medical schools have begun to incorporate self-reflection exercises into their curricula, with the belief that these exercises help students master the material more deeply and perform better. Reflection may be a potential learning tool for emergency medicine (EM), but there are few...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
eScholarship Publishing, University of California
2017-01-01
|
| Series: | Western Journal of Emergency Medicine |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://escholarship.org/uc/item/775324rm |
| Summary: | Introduction: Medical schools have begun to incorporate self-reflection exercises into their
curricula, with the belief that these exercises help students master the material more deeply and
perform better. Reflection may be a potential learning tool for emergency medicine (EM), but
there are few data supporting this hypothesis. The authors evaluated the relationship between a
linguistic marker of the degree of reflection after a student’s shift in an emergency department and
that student’s clerkship performance.
Methods: The authors conducted a retrospective case series by analyzing the performance and
reflective statements of 116 students from a single medical school who participated in a required
EM clerkship at one or two of four clinical sites from 2013-14. After each shift, an attending
emergency physician evaluated the student according to the RIME (Reporter-Interpreter-Manager-
Educator) scheme. The authors developed software to extract the text from those comments,
remove uninformative words and standardize the remaining words. The authors determined
the most common words and two-word phrases that students used to describe their shift. The
correlation between students’ final clerkship grades and the fraction of student comments with at
least one content word was analyzed.
Results: Of the 145 possible students, 116 were included for analysis. The other 29 were
excluded as they were visiting students who did not receive a fi nal numeric grade. The correlation
between final grade and the number of completed self-reflections was 0.32. The correlation
between final grade and the average number of words in each self -reflection was 0.21. The first
correlation is significantly greater than 0 (p=0.03, t-test), but the second correlation is not (p=0.16,
t-test). The median final grade of those who wrote reflections on more tha n half of their shifts
was significantly greater than those who wrote reflections half of the time, 83.675 versus 79.23
(p=0.05, 2-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test).
Conclusion: Students who reflected more frequently received a higher grade in an EM clerkship
for fourth-year medical students. The number of words in each reflection was not significantly
correlated with grade performance. The most common words and phrases students wrote were
associated with learning and managing patients. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1936-900X 1936-9018 |