NYU Grossman School of Medicine, NYU Langone Health, New York City, New York, USA.
Clin Teach. 2024 Dec;21(6):e13798. doi: 10.1111/tct.13798. Epub 2024 Aug 18.
Teaching clinical pharmacology is often a challenge for medical schools. The benefits and popularity of active recall and spaced repetition through Anki flashcards are well-established and can offer a solution for teaching complex topics, but educators are often unfamiliar with this resource.
We implemented 501 faculty-generated pharmacology flashcards in five modules across the medical preclinical curriculum, available to 104 first-year students. At the end of each module, students were surveyed on the usefulness of this novel resource. The data from the cohort who had access to flashcards was compared with the previous cohort, without access, to analyse whether student use of Anki flashcards changed students' perceptions of the pharmacology curriculum and whether there were changes in pharmacology exam performance.
Seventy-five percent of the respondents rated the Anki pharmacology flashcards as 'very useful' or 'somewhat useful'. Eight hundred and seventy-five responses were analysed with a natural language processing algorithm, showing that fewer students mentioned pharmacology as a difficult topic in the cardiovascular and renal modules, compared with the cohort who did not use Anki flashcards. There was not a statistically significant difference in test scores between the cohorts.
Anki flashcards were well-received by medical students, which might have impacted their perception of the curriculum, as evidenced by the decrease in mentions of pharmacology being a difficult topic, maintaining consistency in academic performance. Educators should consider providing flashcards to offer spaced repetition opportunities in the curriculum; an additional benefit could be increasing information equality in medical schools.
医学学校的临床药理学教学常常具有挑战性。通过 Anki 闪卡进行主动回忆和间隔重复的好处和普及度已经得到充分证实，这为教授复杂主题提供了一种解决方案，但教育工作者通常不熟悉这一资源。
我们在医学预科课程的五个模块中实施了 501 张教师制作的药理学闪卡，供 104 名一年级学生使用。在每个模块结束时，学生们会被调查这种新资源的有用性。对有和没有使用 Anki 闪卡的两个学生群体的数据进行了比较，以分析学生使用 Anki 闪卡是否改变了他们对药理学课程的看法，以及药理学考试成绩是否有变化。
75%的受访者认为 Anki 药理学闪卡“非常有用”或“有些有用”。使用自然语言处理算法分析了 875 条回复，结果表明，与未使用 Anki 闪卡的学生相比，在心血管和肾脏模块中，提到药理学是一个难题的学生较少。两个学生群体的考试成绩没有统计学上的显著差异。
医学学生对 Anki 闪卡的接受度很高，这可能影响了他们对课程的看法，这一点从药理学作为一个难题的提及减少得到了证明，同时保持了学术表现的一致性。教育工作者应该考虑在课程中提供闪卡，为学生提供间隔重复的机会；这一额外的好处可能是增加医学院的信息平等。
