Abstract Details

A 90-minute review session was offered prior to the neurology shelf exam for each of seven student cohorts between October 2019 and May 2020. Anonymized scores were collected for these seven cohorts and for the corresponding seven cohorts of the prior academic year. Mean raw score and standard deviation were calculated for the compiled cohorts from each academic year. These were compared with a two-tailed student’s t-test.

The students in the 2019-2020 group receiving a review session answered a mean of 82.9 questions correctly (n=60), while the mean score of the 2018-2019 group was 79.9 (n=61, p-value = 0.01). This represented an increase of nearly 15 percentile ranks.

This is the first study to suggest a positive effect on neurology shelf exam scores by a particular educational intervention, replicating the results of similar studies in the field of psychiatry. Our findings also illustrate a simple way to involve resident trainees in medical student education. Since prior studies indicate that students feel their educational experience and interest in neurology is significantly heightened with increased resident involvement, these review sessions may offer a dual benefit: combating student "neurophobia" while simultaneously giving residents the opportunity to reflect on and refine their teaching skills.