PurposeNear-peer teaching (NPT) is a highly valuable resource for the education of medical undergraduates with benefits to the students, teachers themselves, and the faculty. To maximise the effectiveness of such teaching programmes, the aim of this study was to determine how the student learning experience, and underpinning social and cognitive congruencies changes as the learner–teacher distance increases.MethodsSecond-year medical students at the University of Southampton participated in a series of neuroanatomy, extra-curricular revision sessions taught by the third-, fourth-, and fifth-year medical students and junior doctors. The students completed a validated questionnaire after the session rating various aspects of the teaching.ResultsAlthough all teachers delivered sessions that we rated highly with a mean perceived gain in knowledge of 18 % amongst all students, it was found that the third- and fourth-year medical students delivered a session that was rated significantly better than the fifth-year students and junior doctors across all, but one areas of feedback.ConclusionsWe believe that these findings may be explained by the diminishing social and cognitive congruencies shared between learner and teacher with increasing distance. From our results, we hypothesise that graduation is an important threshold, where there is a significant drop in congruencies between the learner and teacher, therefore, having a significant impact on the perception of the NPT session.

Abstract:It is important that clinicians are able to adequately assess their level of knowledge and competence in order to be safe practitioners of medicine. The medical literature is rife with examples of poor self-assessment accuracy amongst medical students over a range of subjects however this ability in neuroanatomy has yet to be observed. Second year medical students attending neuroanatomy revision sessions at the University of Southampton and the competitors of the National Undergraduate Neuroanatomy Competition (NUNC) were asked to rate their level of knowledge in neuroanatomy. The responses from the former group were compared to performance on a 10 item MCQ examination and the latter group were compared to their performance within the competition. In both cohorts self-assessments of perceived level of knowledge correlated weakly to their performance in their respective objective knowledge assessments (r=0.30 and r=0.41). Within the NUNC this correlation improved when students were instead asked to rate their performance on a specific examination within the competition (spotter, r=0.64; MCQ, r=0.6). Despite its inherent difficulty, medical student self-assessment accuracy in neuroanatomy is comparable to other subjects within the medical curriculum.

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