Evaluation of a teaching workshop for residents at the University of Saskatchewan: A pilot study

Purpose. The University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine in Saskatoon, Canada, has been running a two-day workshop for teachers since 1993 to which both faculty and residents had been invited. Although the design of the workshop is consistent with principles of adult learning, it was important to determine if the workshop effectively helped residents to acquire and then use key teaching skills in real-world situations where they were called on to organize and make presentations. Method. This study, conducted in 1998 and 1999 with residents only, used a randomized controlled experiment with third-party ratings of before and after videotaped teaching sessions done in actual performance settings. There were eight residents each in the control and intervention groups. Results. The intervention group made statistically significant and positive changes in two key areas taught in the workshop and showed slight improvement in a third. The changes made by the residents in the intervention group were in presenting the opening "set" (41.4% absolute improvement) and the use of instructional objectives (11.5%). The "body" of their teaching sessions increased slightly (9.3%). The control group held relatively stable. Conclusion. While this study demonstrates that the workshop likely made a difference in the teaching performance of the intervention group, the small sample size (eight in each group) and the presence of confounding variables suggest that further research should be conducted.