Active Learning and Competency Preconditioning: Strengthens Osteopathic Medical Student Performance, Physician Attributes and Competency Assessments.

Abstract: The medical education has been reliant on didactic lectures which are predominantly teacher centered learning method. The competency based medical education was introduced in North America and with this came the paradigm shift in how schools conceptualize curriculum and measure the outcomes to learning. This new and modern approach started a change away from the traditional lecture based and teacher centered curriculum to more student centric by using various tools. The competency-based education is vastly regarded as an outcome-based approach to design, implement and evaluate the curriculum using widely accepted competencies. AACOM recommends seven core competencies with in which you have various indicators which address the student’s performances. The main purpose of this research is to utilize active learning tools to assess the competencies in the first year of medical school which will provide better academic outcome, physician who is knowledgeable and satisfies all the competencies as needed by the Licensure authority. Materials & Methods: The study was conducted at medical school during the first semester of medical school and included 145 students. Various active learning tools like, team-based learning, quizzes, popup quizzes, case discussions were used to assess the competency in biochemistry and genetics course, and they were compared to questions based on concepts delivered by traditional lecture method. Results: The student’s performance on high stake examination after the active learning session on the content and concepts delivered and learnt had a statistically higher average percent point in the second, third and fourth examination. The average Diff (p) for second, third and fourth examination to the questions being considered for the study were (Diff p= 0.84, 0.83 and 0.92) with positive moderate correlation for second examination(r= 0.535) and strong positive correlation for third and fourth examination ( r=0.745 and r=0.856) with their final biochemistry grades. Conclusion: The study does not prove that active learning methods are the best way to deliver curriculum for competency based education system, but there are some positive and significant data that has emerged which does convince that these active learning methods may be better suited for providing and assessing the competencies .