Peer Instruction: an Analysis of Quality Improvement at Boonshoft School of Medicine (BSOM)

Abstract

With the recent focus in changing medical school educational pedagogy from a traditional lecture model to a problem-solving and critical-thinking model, Peer Instruction (PI) was instituted at Boonshoft School of Medicine (BSOM). Based on feedback from students, BSOM made several procedural changes between the 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 academic school year (AYs) to improve PI. One course, Medical Neuroscience (MN), was consistently identified by students to be the model for PI. The purpose of this study was to identify if student and faculty perceptions toward PI had changed between the two academic years and to elucidate differences between PI in the MN course and other courses. Among students, there was a 68.5% increase in positive attitude toward PI between AYs. Faculty attitudes of positive/very positive improved by 18.7%. Faculty did not agree as strongly as did the students that the alterations in grading were a positive change. When PI was done well in a course (MN), 93.4% of students agreed that correct answers were well explained, whereas 60.5% of students agreed for other courses. For MN, 94.8% of students agreed that incorrect answers were well explained. For other courses, only 46.1% agreed despite 93.8% of faculty believing there is educational benefit in explaining incorrect answers. In conclusion, there was a positive change in attitude toward PI, and while faculty believe there is educational benefit in explaining incorrect answers, students did not feel both correct and incorrect answers were well explained suggesting a gap that needs to be fixed.