Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Advisor

Amber Todd

Abstract

As medical schools are striving to enroll the most diverse candidates to their schools, the medical schools have developed enriching prematriculation programs to their diverse candidates to ensure that all students are prepared for the first year of medical school. The prematriculation programs attempt to build in academic content with study techniques to help students become confident in their learning in the first weeks of school but also in the last months of their first year when they can still employ various study tools learned in the summer from the prematriculation program. However, with the implementation of these programs, there is scant evidence to support the need for these programs and justification of allocating funds towards these programs. Analyzing the success of those who attended prematriculation programs is imperative to understanding the impact of these programs and can help in decision making of expanding these programs and altering the curriculum if needed.

A data set from the two consecutive years of prematriculation program, Class of 2021 and 2022, from Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University (BSOMWSU) was used to determine the effectiveness of the program by measuring academic success of those who attended the program on midcourse exams and course final exams compared to those who qualified to attend the program but did not attend as well as those who did not qualify. To test this hypothesis, we used the individual exam scores from the respective three groups and used analysis of covariance test. SPSS was used to carry out descriptive and analytic statistics.1

Analysis showed those who did not qualify for the program scored higher on all Year1 exams. Additionally, those who qualified and enrolled in the prematriculation program scored lower on all Year 1 course exams than their counterparts the program. These results may suggest that the prematriculation program is ineffective in any one of various ways. Since the program is still in its infancy with new curricula, the results may indicate that curricula may need better alignment to the school year curricula or instructors may need to go through more training on how to better approach this demographic of students and teaching the content. While the program does not appear to demonstrate an academic boost to these students, there may be social and emotional benefits to attending these programs that can be apart of a future study.

Download


Share

COinS