An online guided e-journal exercise in pre-clerkship years: oxidative phosphorylation in brown adipose tissue.

The rationale for this mandatory, guided online e-journal exercise is to foster the ability of students to independently read medical and scientific literature in a critical manner and to integrate journal reading with their basic science knowledge. After a lecture on oxidative phosphorylation, students were assigned to read an article on brown adipose tissue published in New England Journal of Medicine and were guided to analyze the article by answering online questions. After two iterations, student surveys about the project, its key pedagogical features, and ways to improve it suggest that the students perceived these exercises as active learning, which is clinically relevant and built on their course material.

Implementation of a novel web-based objective structured clinical evaluation.

Background: This study was performed to identify factors that impact student performance on a web-based objective structured clinical evaluation (OSCE) that was developed to improve the evaluation process of students who complete a fourth-year surgical clerkship in trauma-critical care.

Methods: We created a multiple-choice OSCE with commercially available software. Clinical cases were developed for incorporation into 7 quizzes that were assembled to appear as 1 examination.