Evaluating the Use of Social Media to Enhance the Educational Experience of a Medical School Surgery Clerkship

Evaluating the Use of Social Media to Enhance the Educational Experience of a Medical School Surgery Clerkship

Grant:
Investigating Student Learning Grant (ISL)
Academic Year:
2013 - 2014 (June 1, 2013 through May 31, 2014)
Funding Requested:
$4,000.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
waitss
englesbe
breames
Overview of the Project:
Evaluating the Use of Social Media to Enhance the Educational Experience of a Medical School Surgery Clerkship Over the last decade, online social media has become a popular and widely used means of interpersonal interaction and communication. Twitter is one such free social networking service that allows people to communicate and interact through "microblogging:" the act of exchanging small pieces of information in 140 characters or less. Since it was created in 2006, it has grown exponentially to include more than 200 million users worldwide, with more than half "tweeting" once per month to an audience of "followers". Numerous scholarly articles have investigated the use of Twitter in medicine, including a recent JAMA article identifying more than 300 physicians on Twitter with more than 500 followers. Multiple articles highlighting the potential benefits of using Twitter for educational purposes have also been published recently.

continued in project objectives...
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:

Project Overview

To date, a review of recent literature does not reveal any studies that have examined the use of social media to enhance the educational experience in a medical school clerkship. Thus we propose a study to implement and evaluate the use of social media to enhance the subjective and objective experience of the medical school surgery clerkship. Throughout the clerkship, we will use Twitter to enhance student-centered surgical education by sending intermittent, high-yield surgical learning points to the students' smartphones. At the end of the rotation, we will gather objective data from post-clerkship standardized tests, and subjective data from pre- and post-clerkship surveys, to evaluate the influence of Twitter on the educational experience of surgery clerkship students.

Project Objectives

  1. Evaluate the impact of integrating Twitter on knowledge, interest and engagement during a surgery clerkship.
  2. Evaluate the utility of social media as a tool for learning during a medical school clerkship.
Project Achievements:

The 'Twitter' project will have a lasting impact on the surgery department and surgery clerkship. For a 12 month period, students were asked to fill out a short pre-clerkship and post-clerkship survey, assessing their use of social media (pre) and the impact of the Twitter intervention on their knowledge, engagement, and interest in surgery (post). The Twitter handle MLearnSurgery has gained over 450 followers over the last year and has helped to bring small facts to 6 cohorts of 3rd year medical students. After completing the 12 month period, the survey's were complied, yielding 60 matched pre/post survey responses. Those responses were tabulated and will be complied for inclusion in a peer-reviewed journal article.

Continuation:
Our project has the potential to continue past the grant period. By utilizing a platform which can be continuously updated, it has the opportunity to be useful for students for years to come. Students can interact with the medical facts by retweeting, favoriting or commenting on previous tweets. Additionally, followers can include the Twitter handle to increase access to information such as journal clubs, articles and pictures.
Dissemination:
We plan to compile the data to be published in a peer reviewed medical journal. We are also participating in a lunch with recent ISL winners to help teach them what did (and didn't) work during our grant period.
PRINTER VERSION
SEND BY EMAIL