Background
High-quality medical educational resources are essential to ensure adequate knowledge acquisition by medical students. With widespread use of smartphones and subsequently easily accessible online educational resources, there is a body of evidence that suggests that such resources can be used to enhance the learning experience. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of web-based plastic surgery educational tool for medical students.
Methods
Fourth year medical students completing surgical attachments at Dunedin and Invercargill hospitals were invited to participate. An educational website was developed by the authors to include the most common plastic surgery presentations encountered in clinical practice. Both the control and intervention groups completed a study-specific multi-choice question test (MCQ) at the commencement of their clinical attachments. The intervention group was subsequently provided with website access and a second MCQ was completed by both groups following completion of their attachments. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, Mann Whitney-U tests, and Spearman’s rank order correlation were used for statistical analysis. P values were taken to be significant at 0.05.
Results
Both control (n=37) and intervention (n=31) groups had a similar level of knowledge at baseline and both groups had a statistically significant improvement in MCQ scores (p<0.001) on completion of their attachments. The improvement scores between the two group were similar. Post-MCQ survey found that 35% of the intervention group used the website, and the website users outperformed their non-website user counterparts (r=0.38, p=0.036). Students completing a plastic surgery rotation during their surgical attachment performed better than those did not (r=0.36, p=0.003).
Conclusion
Online educational resources are efficacious in improving the acquisition of core plastic surgical knowledge by medical students. Additional research is indicated to identify strategies to improve the usage of such resources by medical students.