The Impact of a Team Based Learning Exercise in the Understanding and Retention of Medical School Nutrition Education

Abstract

BackgroundIntegration of clinical nutrition into medical school curriculum is essential in order to produce future physicians who are knowledgeable and confident in applying nutrition as it relates to disease prevention and treatment of disease. Currently, limited curriculum time is dedicated to nutritional content and many medical students lack confidence in applying their nutritional knowledge to a clinical context. A team‐based learning exercise (TBL) was implemented in the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine (CWRU SOM) curriculum during the preclinical nutrition, gastroenterology and biochemistry block in order to enhance and increase nutritional knowledge and confidence. We believe that a TBL is an effective modality to educate students on the fundamentals of nutrition and increase retention of this information.Key MessageThe objective of this study is to determine if the implementation of a TBL activity will enhance medical students' understanding of nutrition concepts and increase retention of nutritional information during the clinical years. At CWRU SOM, we have received personal feedback from students wishing that they had more exposure to nutrition concepts during their preclinical years. Literature reviews have also demonstrated that many medical students lack confidence in demonstrating their nutritional knowledge in a clinical context, including during their clinical rotations. We believe that increasing the amount of nutrition content students are exposed to during their preclinical years would ultimately help increase students' knowledge and confidence. The TBL exercise was implemented into the required preclinical curriculum for first year medical students. For preparation, students were asked to watch a series of short videos focusing on specific nutrition concepts such as metabolic syndrome, hypertension, and nutrition labels. The TBL exercise focused on case vignettes which applied the information introduced in the videos. In order to evaluate the efficacy of the team‐based learning session, an optional posttest was administered both to students who received the intervention and to a randomly selected medical student cohort that did not participate in the educational intervention, and their results were compared.DiscussionA lack of basic understanding and confidence in nutritional counseling motivated us to seek out a new opportunity to incorporate more nutritional content into the preclinical curriculum. Incorporating additional nutrition content to the preclinical curriculum is not only responsive to previous feedback, but provides an opportunity to improve students' understanding of nutrition as it relates to disease prevention and treatment of disease.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.