To establish how different group sizes affect students learning basic surgical skills Chuan Zhang, Ieuan Reece, Cassandra Streeter, Zahra Al-Hubeshy SCRUBS Undergraduate Surgical Society, University of Leicester, Maurice Shock Medical Sciences Building, Leicester PO Box 138, LE1 9HN, United Kingdom
INTRODUCTION • Leicester’s Surgical society (SCRUBS) run several suturing events each academic year • Teachers taught basic suturing techniques to small groups of students. • Student to teacher ratio was dependant upon number of teachers available. Group sizes have ranged from 2 students to 8 students in the past. • Previous studies have shown a greater effectiveness in smaller group sizes in postgraduate education[1]. • We wanted to investigate whether if different group sizes affect undergraduate students’ learning basic surgical skills.
AIM To evaluate the impact of different teaching group sizes on students’ learning of basic surgical skills.
CONTACT Chuan Zhang Leicester Scrubs Email:
[email protected] METHODOLOGY
RESULTS
A basic suturing event was held for 36 first year students without prior suturing experience.
There were 12 students in each of the three groups. Students in Group A were the most confident in performing a basic interrupted suture (mean score 8.83), compared to those in group B (mean score 8.50) and C (mean score 6.583).
Students were randomly allocated into 1 of 3 groups: Group A, B and C, with group sizes of 2, 4 or 6 students per tutor, respectively.
Students were then taught to carry out basic knot tying and basic interrupted sutures in their allocated groups by senior medical students. Using a Likert questionnaire (scale 1-10, 1 being the least confident and 10 being the most confident), students were asked to rate their confidence in carrying out basic interrupted sutures at the end of the workshop.
a)
DISCUSSION • The results suggest that there is no difference in students’ confidence in performing learnt basic surgical skills when taught with a 2:1 student to tutor ratio compared to a 4:1 ratio.
Group A students were significantly more confident by the end of the session compared to those in Group C (mean difference 2.25, 95% CI 1.098 to 3.402).
• However, there is a significant reduction in students’ confidence levels in performing learnt basic surgical skills when there are 6 students per tutor.
Similarly, Group B students were significantly more confident by the end of the session compared to those in Group C (mean difference 1.917, 95% CI 0.76 to 3.07).
• Therefore in the future, students will be taught in groups of 2 or 4.
However there was no significant improvement in confidence levels when comparing students from group A and B (mean difference 0.33, 95% CI -0.818- 1.48, p>0.05).
Data was analysed using one way ANOVA test. Group
Group Size
A
2 students
B
4 students
C
6 students
Table 1: Table presenting the size of each group.
Figure 2: Photo showing a group of students being taught basic interrupted sutures
REFERENCES Figure 1: Graph shows the mean score of students’ confidence in performing basic interrupted sutures. ***p