Is the evaluation of the personal statement a reliable component of the general surgery residency application?

Background: Each year, fourth-year medical students spend considerable time writing and rewriting their personal statements. However, there is little evidence of what role the personal statement plays in deciding which applicants will be invited for an interview.

Objective: To evaluate the inter-rater reliability of a surgical selection committee's ratings for both the personal statement and the application summary parts of the residency application.

Do study strategies predict academic performance in medical school?

Context:  Study strategies, such as time and study management techniques, seem to be consistently related to achievement even when aptitude is controlled for, but the picture is not entirely clear. As there is limited research in this area, we explored the relative strengths of academic aptitude, as measured by the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) and study strategies, as measured by the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), in predicting academic performance in 106 students in the first semester of an integrated curriculum.

Objectives:  Our purpose was to determine whether relationships could be identified between academic aptitude, study strategies and academic performance which would enable us to provide students with feedback in certain skill areas in order to maximise achievement.

Lexicons, contexts, events, and images: commentary on Elman (2009) from the perspective of dual coding theory.

Elman (2009) proposed that the traditional role of the mental lexicon in language processing can largely be replaced by a theoretical model of schematic event knowledge founded on dynamic context-dependent variables. We evaluate Elman's approach and propose an alternative view, based on dual coding theory and evidence that modality-specific cognitive representations contribute strongly to word meaning and language performance across diverse contexts which also have effects predictable from dual coding theory.

The Texas A&M experience with class size and campus expansion: evaluation of first year using distance learning and on-site curriculum delivery.

Background: The Texas A&M College of Medicine was traditionally a small 2+2 institution where students spent 2 years on one campus for basic science study and 2 years on another campus for clinical study.

Purpose: To answer calls for an increased physician workforce, we more than doubled our class size and our number of fully matriculating branch campuses. This article describes the 1st full year's experience with expansion.

Enhancing competency in professionalism: targeting resident advance directive education.

Background: Education about advance directives typically is incorporated into medical school curricula and is not commonly offered in residency. Residents' experiences with advance directives are generally random, nonstandardized, and difficult to assess. In 2008, an advance directive curriculum was developed by the Scott & White/Texas A&M University System Health Science Center College of Medicine (S&W/Texas A&M) internal medicine residency program and the hospital's legal department.

Learning basic surgical skills with mental imagery: using the simulation centre in the mind.

Context: Although surgeons and athletes frequently use mental imagery in preparing to perform, mental imagery has not been extensively researched as a learning technique in medical education.

Objective: A mental imagery rehearsal technique was experimentally compared with textbook study to determine the effects of each on the learning of basic surgical skills.

Methods: Sixty-four Year 2 medical students were randomly assigned to 2 treatment groups in which they undertook either mental imagery or textbook study.

Student Course Evaluations: Common Themes across Courses and Years.

Student course evaluations were analyzed for common themes across five different basic science, clinical, and innovative courses from the first and third years of medical school. Each course had both unique and common numerically scaled items including an overall quality rating item. A principal components analysis was conducted for each course to determine the items that loaded most heavily on the same component as the overall quality item.

A reliable and valid instrument to assess competency in basic surgical skills in second-year medical students.

Background: Despite calls for competency based education, a dearth of validated instruments for measuring basic skills currently exists. We developed an instrument to assess competency in basic surgical skills in second-year medical students and tested it for psychometric reliability and validity.

Methods: From a review of the literature, an instrument comprised of numerically scaled items was constructed.

Attitudes of veterinary medical students and medical students toward collaborative learning: an experiment.

This study measured the attitudes of 55 medical students and 30 veterinary medical students as they participated in an experiment of collaborative teaching and learning about basic surgical skills. Two parallel forms of an attitude questionnaire were developed, with three subscales: confidence in one's own surgical skill; collaboration with the other type of student; and inter-professional collaboration in general. These attitude scales were administered before and after an experiment involving the veterinary medical students teaching the medical students incision and exploratory laparoscopy in a laboratory setting using live rabbits.

Comparing the effects of physical practice and mental imagery rehearsal on learning basic surgical skills by medical students.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to test the effects of varying the amount of physical practice and mental imagery rehearsal on learning basic surgical procedures.

Study Design: Using a sample of 65 second-year medical students, 3 randomized groups received either: (1) 3 sessions of physical practice on suturing a pig's foot; (2) 2 sessions of physical practice and 1 session of mental imagery rehearsal; or (3) 1 session of physical practice and 2 sessions of imagery rehearsal. All participants then performed a surgery on a live rabbit in the operating theater of a veterinary college under approved conditions.