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Background: The integration of bedside ultrasound into medical school curricula is limited by the availability of skilled faculty instructors. Peer mentors have been utilized successfully to teach clinical and procedural skills and may serve as a valuable resource for potential ultrasound instructors. We describe a method to train senior medical students as peer instructors for a combined ultrasound/physical exam curriculum and assessed junior medical students' perceptions of peer instruction relative to faculty.Description: The University of Colorado has incorporated ultrasound into ocular, abdominal, musculoskeletal, cardiac, vascular, and pulmonary physical exam instruction for 1st-year (n= 155) and 2nd-year (n= 155) medical students. Fourth-year medical students who completed a 2- or 4-week bedside ultrasound elective were recruited as peer instructors. Both peer and faculty instructors received similar session training and were assigned to random groups of junior medical students. Instructor evaluation scores completed by students were collected after every session.Evaluation: Twenty students and 29 faculty served as instructors for the curriculum. Comparisons of evaluation scores between faculty and student teachers were equivalent (α >.05) in 5 out of 6 sessions. In addition, students who taught more than 1 session showed improvement in their instructor scores and had higher average scores than students who taught only 1 session. Student instructors who completed the 4-week elective had higher average scores than students who completed the 2-week elective.Conclusions: Students’ perception of peer instructors’ teaching competency was equivalent to faculty instructors for the majority of sessions. Senior students who have completed an elective ultrasound rotation may serve as a useful resource for circumstances where the availability of skilled instructors is limited. However, further research is required to evaluate their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Active learning" (AL) recently has become a cornerstone of the calls for reform in legal education in the United States. This article studies three years of data on a comprehensive AL program for first-year law students at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida, in order to evaluate whether a student's attendance at AL sessions improves his or her law school grades. Holding all other factors constant (such as undergraduate grade point average and Law School Admission Test score), we found that a student who attended all the AL sessions was expected to earn a cumulative first-year law school grade point average that is 0.47 grade points (on a 4.00 scale) higher than a student who attended none of the sessions. These results and similar statistical analyses of the database are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous paper, we have shown that academic rank is largely unrelated to tutorial teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we further explore the effectiveness of the lowest-ranked instructors: students. We confirm that students are almost as effective as senior instructors, and we produce results informative on the effects of expanding the use of student instructors. We conclude that hiring moderately more student instructors would not harm students, but exclusively using them will likely negatively affect student outcomes. Given how inexpensive student instructors are, however, such a policy might still be worth it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]