Evaluation of Team-Teaching as a Means of Integrating Microbiology and Pharmacology

Abstract

Team-teaching is a commonly used method for delivering content in medical schools with an integrated curriculum. However, there is wide variation in the temporal organization of a team-taught course at the session (i.e., lecture) level. The two most prominent team-teaching strategies are (1) co-teaching sessions with multiple faculty in each session or (2) independently teaching sessions with a single faculty in each session. Current studies evaluating the effects of team-teaching on student outcomes are lacking. Our goal in this study was to determine if the temporal organization of team-taught sessions would alter student exam performance in an integrated medical school course taught by faculty from different disciplines. Here, we compare exam performance of students co-taught microbiology and pharmacology with students independently taught microbiology and pharmacology in separate “stand-alone” sessions. Our results demonstrate that students performed lower on microbiology topics in the independently taught stand-alone sessions as compared to the co-taught sessions. The decrease in microbiology scores was accompanied by a slight decrease in the microbiology faculty evaluation scores. The pharmacology-specific performance was not significantly altered between the two approaches although the pharmacology faculty evaluation scores increased in the individually taught iteration of the course compared to the co-taught version. These results suggest that although co-teaching the basic sciences in an integrated fashion led to improvements in student performance, these gains should be carefully balanced with the considerable investment of time and resources associated with co-teaching.