How Prepared Are They? Pediatric Boot Camps and Intern Performance.

Objective: To determine whether participation in a pediatric boot camp during medical school was associated with higher intern performance. Secondary objectives were to determine whether participation in general boot camps, pediatric subinternships or pediatric electives was associated with higher performance.

Methods: Intern surveys and faculty performance assessments during early internship were collected from a convenience sample of pediatric residency programs.

Going "Fourth" From Medical School: Fourth-Year Medical Students' Perspectives on the Fourth Year of Medical School.

Purpose: To learn what graduating medical students considered the primary purposes of the fourth year of medical school, their approach to residency selection, and the challenges they faced in meeting their fourth-year goals.

Method: A 52-question Web-based survey was administered to fourth-year students from 20 U.S.

Getting off to a good start: discussing goals and expectations with medical students.

Medical students highly value a learning environment in which they feel part of the health care team, their views are valued, and they make significant contributions to the care of patients.An orientation that includes an enthusiastic welcome, an opportunity to get to know from where the students have come and where they want to go, and setting mutually agreeable SMART objectives helps create a supportive and effective learning environment.

What makes a great clinical teacher in pediatrics? Lessons learned from the literature.

Great clinical teachers occupy a unique and powerful role in the education of medical students. Their noncognitive and cognitive actions and behaviors influence future student behaviors and career choices and, most importantly, result in a future generation of physicians who are equipped to care for children. Although we continue to have difficulty defining the critical characteristics of a great clinical teacher, identifying such a teacher is easy: they are the ones to whom students and residents flock.

COMSEP: an overview of its history, mission, and relationship to pediatrics.

The reader may wonder, "What is COMSEP, and how does an article from COMSEP affect me?" COMSEP, the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics, is a community of pediatric clerkship directors and other educators whose mission is to improve the health of children and their families by advancing the art and science of medical student education in pediatrics.(1) This is the first in what is envisioned to be a quarterly report from the COMSEP to the readership of Pediatrics. In writing these articles, we hope to accomplish 3 key objectives.

A model for assessing information retrieval and application skills of medical students.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a model for assessing information retrieval and application skills, and to compare the performances on the assessment exercises of students who were and were not instructed in these skills.

Method: The authors developed a set of four examination stations, each with multiple subtasks, and administered the exams to students at two medical schools. Students at one school had intensive instruction in literature searching and filtering skills for information quality (instructed group), and those at the other school had minimal instruction in these areas (uninstructed group).