Learning Objectives, What’s to Gain in Bedside Teaching?

Author(s): Verkleij S P C, de Graaf I M

Introduction: Bedside Teaching (BST) is defined as teaching in presence of a patient. Literature is not clear on learning objectives of students in BST. The aim of this study is to investigate the a priori learning objectives of students. Next to this, we want to investigate if students were more able to meet their own personalized learning objective, when discussing the objectives at the start of the session, and if this was related to satisfaction.

Methods: Prospective cohort study. Sixty-three 5th year medical students filled in questionnaires before and after BST regarding their learning objective and educational experience. IBM® SPSS® statistics version 26 was used for statistical analysis, we performed Pearson’s Chi-square, Mann Whitney U, Mc Nemer and Fisher’s exact.

Results: Most mentioned themes in objectives were clinical reasoning, physical examination and history taking. Students who chose an objective that matched with the patient/topic were more likely to meet their objective (48.9% n=22 vs 88,2% n=66, p= 0.000), were more satisfied (84.4% n=38 vs 98.5% n=67, p=0.006) and experienced more knowledge gain (80% n=36 vs 97.1% n=66, p= 0.006).

Conclusions: Students setting their own achievable learning objective in advance based on patient/topic, creates more satisfaction and more experienced knowledge gain in students.