gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Since repetition is the mother of learning, early and repetitive clinical-like exposure to medical skills within the tutoring system enables gaining confidence in participating in future patient care. In this paper, we aimed to investigate the differences in examination scores in the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) of students, attending compulsory tutor classes only versus attending additional voluntary tutorial lessons.

Methods: We included 86 students of year 3 from Faculty of Medicine Maribor. They practiced history taking and clinical examinations, oriented in separated organ systems, on each other. After compulsory sessions we organized two voluntary repetiton sessions. We divided the students into three groups, based on their attendance. The first group consisted of students who never attended repetition sessions (17%), in the second one were those who had attended once (50%) and students from the last group had attended both repetition sessions (33%). Repetitive sessions were followed by OSCEs.

Results: OSCE results among students who had participated in repetition sessions and those who had not did differ (p=0.006), however OSCE times did not (p=0.124). Students, participating in additional lessons scored more points in OSCE. Furthermore, when we compared students based on number of times they attended repetition sessions where OSCE results also differed (p=0.023) but OSCE times did not (p=0.095).

Conclusions: We found difference in comparing OSCE scores between the groups. Interestingly, there was no difference in time needed for completing the OSCE protocols between the two groups.