Presented By: Sydny Long, University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville
Co-Authors: Helen Kaiser, University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville
Shanna Williams, University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville

Purpose  
Near peer-teaching is a method of improving student retention and comprehension that has shown success in graduate medical education. Near-peer-teaching involves a medical student providing content instruction to another student one or more years their junior. Both the student teaching the material and the student receiving the instruction have demonstrated increased self-confidence and understanding of the material in both pre-clinical and clinical environments.

Method 
At the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville (USCSOMG), we provided an elective rotation to fourth-year clinical medical students (M4s) that involved teaching anatomy to first-year students in the dissection lab and writing summative exam questions for these students under the guidance of anatomy faculty. M4s wrote, edited, and contributed questions to eight exams administered to first-year students over the course of their anatomy module for the academic years of 2021-2022 and 2022-2023. Test items were analyzed to determine difficulty, discrimination index, and point biserial with the purpose of assessing question integrity. For each exam, the means of these three values were compared between questions written by anatomy faculty and for those written by M4s.   

Results
No difference was seen between faculty and M4 written item point biserials, difficulty, and disc index. When items were compared by individual exam, one M4 group items (Head and neck, 2022) showed higher difficulty, and point biserial than faculty items (P value, amount difference).  

Conclusion  
Based on these results, we recommend that fourth-year medical students receive further opportunities to teach content to and write exam questions for first-year medical students to create a more well-rounded, clinically-relevant curriculum and enhance the educational repertoire of early-career doctors.