Abstract
Background: The Case-based Peer Review and Interactive Medical Education (Case-PRIME) project aimed to address the increasing student-to-teacher ratio in undergraduate medical education by leveraging the “Students as Partners” concept for preparation of learning materials. The Case-PRIME project aims to explore the efficacy and limitations of the “Students as partners” concept in production of case-based teaching materials.
Methods: All final year medical students rotating to rheumatology and clinical immunology unit during medical clerkship from March 2024 to February 2025 were enrolled. The students were instructed to draft a clinical scenario with history and physical examination based on a patient they encountered in hospital wards. The case scenario included self-learning questions answers based on learning objectives identified by students. The case scenario would be archived into a question bank for as future teaching and learning materials after verification by tutors. Upon case submission, additional clinical cases for self-learning purposes from the question bank was provided. The quality of the clinical questions drafted by medical students was compared to clinical questions drafted by teachers as a control in clinical relevance, clarity, and level of difficulty in a scale of 0 to 10 by 2 assessors who were blinded to the case writers by Mann-Whitney U test. The course satisfaction was assessed by the student evaluation of educational quality (SEEQ) questionnaire.
Results: 204 students (41 student groups) were enrolled in the project. Quality assessment showed comparable clinical relevance, clarity and level of difficulty between student-submitted cases and cases drafted by the investigator as control. Out of the 18 groups who have provided feedback, 87.8% strongly agreed or agreed that the project was intellectually challenging and stimulating while 93.8% strongly agreed or agreed that they have learned something valuable. 68.8% indicated that their interest in the subject has increased as a consequence of the project. The concept of “Students as partners” was welcomed by most students. 94.5% of students indicated that students were invited to share their ideas and knowledge in this project, while 83.4% strongly agreed or agreed that feedback from the project was valuable. Majority (77.8%) of students rated the project workload relative to other courses as average while 11.1% expressed heavy workload relative to other courses.
Conclusion: Student-prepared clinical scenario demonstrated comparable quality to teacher-drafted scenario in terms of clinical relevance, clarity and difficulty. The “Students as Partners” approach can possibly be applied to preparation of learning materials.