Interactive Retrieval Practice in Renal Physiology Improves Performance on Customized National Board of Medical Examiners Examination of Medical Students

Retrieval practice improves long-term retention. Use of interactive retrieval practice in large group, in-person and online live classes, in combination with outside resources, is unreported for medical physiology classes. The primary study purpose was to compare student cohorts' performance with or without retrieval practice in renal physiology classes, relative to the national average on customized national examinations in renal physiology, non-physiology, and all questions. The secondary purpose was to examine the students' educational experience. For the primary purpose, we used a non-equivalent group, post-test only design. For the secondary purpose, we used cross-sectional and qualitative designs. We analyzed examination results of 684 students in four academic years. For renal physiology questions, students performed significantly better in years with retrieval practice compared to years without it (P < 0.001). There was no change in non-physiology scores over the four years. Performance in all questions, too, significantly improved (P < 0.001). A large majority (86%) of students indicated retrieval practice helped them learn renal physiology. Student ratings of quality in online classes, which featured interactive retrieval practice, were higher than that of in-person classes (P < 0.001). Qualitative analysis revealed students found interactive retrieval practice, scaffolding, outside resources, and the instructor's teaching style helpful. Educators in medical physiology classes can use our findings to implement interactive retrieval practice.

An interactive retrieval system for clinical trial studies with context-dependent protocol elements

A clinical trial protocol defines the procedures that should be performed during a clinical trial. Every clinical trial begins with the design of its protocol. While designing the protocol, most researchers refer to electronic databases and extract protocol elements using a keyword search. However, state-of-the-art retrieval systems only offer text-based searches for user-entered keywords. In this study, we present an interactive retrieval system with a context-dependent and protocol-element-selection function for successfully designing a clinical trial protocol. To do this, we first introduce a database for a protocol retrieval system constructed from individual protocol data extracted from 184,634 clinical trials and 13,210 frame structures of clinical trial protocols. The database contains various semantic information that enables the protocols to be filtered during the search operation. Based on the database, we developed a web application called the clinical trial protocol database system (CLIPS; available at https://corus.kaist.edu/clips), which enables an interactive search by utilizing protocol elements. CLIPS provides the options to select the next element according to the previous element in the form of a connected tree, thus enabling an interactive search for combinations of protocol elements. The validation results show that our method achieves better performance than existing databases in predicting phenotypic features.