Purpose
Students enter medical school from disparate backgrounds, most of which do not simulate the rigor and workload of medical school. Consequently, many students struggle due to poorly developed academic skills/strategies. We developed an intervention to improve students’ academic success strategies through integration in the first foundational sciences course in the curriculum.

Methods
The intervention was delivered to ~120 M1 students. To assess the intervention’s efficacy, pre- and post-surveys were developed, focused on self-regulated learning strategies, and inspired by the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. All students completed the survey before and after the intervention. We explored if there was a significant difference in proportions of answers selected between pre- and post-surveys, using a non-parametric chi-squared test.

Results
Significant differences were observed between the pre- and post-surveys. In some cases, survey responses suggested that the intervention was successful in improving self-reported study skills. For example, after the intervention ~1.5X more students indicated that they summarize the main points for a topic, >2X as many students formulate questions for the topics covered in class, and about 1.5X as many students indicated that they test themselves with practice questions. In other cases, student responses were surprising. For example, after the intervention, >3X as many students indicated that they don’t typically prepare for class, ~2X as many students indicated that they don’t review session learning objectives to ensure their comfort with the content, nor do they identify concepts not understood and focus on reviewing those content areas.

Conclusion
Pre-post survey analysis suggests that the intervention may improve some academic success skills. Surprising findings may suggest that question interpretation by students and researchers was discordant, or that the intervention wasn’t successful in changing student behavior. These observations provide guidance for the development of refined academic success skills instruction in the foundational sciences curriculum.