Review of JIAMSE Issue 1 of Volume 20

To all IAMSE members,

With issue 1 of Volume 20 of our journal, JIAMSE www.jiamse.org about to be published, on the behalf of the Publications Committee I would like to bring your attention to Volume 19-4 by briefly reviewing a couple of the articles.

The first is an interesting Short Communication from Dekker and de Craen from Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands (p. 142-144). The authors report on a teaching experiment to assess the effect of promotional incentives on second-year medical student judgments regarding the credibility of information presented to them. In this short study, students in a second year class on scientific reasoning were randomly divided into two groups, one that received a promotional gift from the University and the other that did not. They were then presented information on nine slides regarding the evolutionary development of the nose. Four of the nine slides were fictional. Following the presentation, students were asked to assess the authenticity of the information. After analyzing the student answers, the authors found that students that received the promotional gift were four times more likely to believe the fictional slides that those who had not received the promotional gift. The authors conclude that even small promotional gifts can influence judgments of the credibility of information presented to them, and thus, promotional incentives are not harmless.

The second paper is from Wenger et al. at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown, WV. In this IRB approved study, students near the end of their second year were asked to rank study resources they used to prepare for their pathology exams. These study resources included lecture attendance, viewing recorded lectures, textbook, practice with USMLE-type study questions, etc. The responses were linked with student’s cumulative score, and a bivariate fit analysis was used to compare the cumulative score with the utilization of study sources after anonymization. In this study, the authors found that those who utilized clinical vignette-type questions to practice performed on average 5 points higher than the class average, which was statistically significant. They also found that students who utilized recorded lectures over other resources scored on average 2.9 points lower than the class average, although this was not statistically significant.

The Publications Committee would like to encourage you not only to read JIAMSE, but also to submit your papers to JIAMSE for publication. In addition to Research Articles and Short Communications, other paths to publication in JIAMSE include short reviews of websites that may assist the medical educator (Medical Educators Resource Guide), Commentaries, Letters to the Editor, and publication of preliminary results of a novel approach to medical education as an Innovation.

William E. Seifert, Jr., Ph.D.
The University of Texas Medical School at Houston