In my last entry, I talked about the learning benefits of spaced education for 3rd year medical students doing a urology rotation. Spaced education means simply extended the learning and practice over time. The study I referenced looked at learning after giving students a series of questions using email and found better learning results for the students who had received this kind of education.
The authors of that study did a follow-up study (Journal of Urology, 2009, 181:2671-2673) and found that the benefits of that treatment could still be found, more than 2 years later. This is an amazing result for an educational study. It will certainly need to be replicated but it is very encouraging and speaks to the strength of spacing education out over time.
The authors found that students who had received the spaced education did significantly better on a test of the material than students who had not received the spaced education intervention. The test questions they were given were different from the questions they had answered in the original study (but were from the same batch so they were somewhat similar).
Spaced education and practice can be used fairly easily by using email or even mobile devices, a matter of spreading the practice over time. It should be used more often in CME applications.
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