Improving Educational Outcomes by Changing Up the Boring PowerPoint Lecture

Purpose: Didactic lectures promote a passive educational approach. Passive educational approaches are associated with worse educational outcomes compared to an active approach.1 The goal of this abstract is to investigate various improvements to the same lecture to determine if it impacted learners in a positive or negative way.

Methodology: This study was considered exempt by the Upstate IRB. This study took place from 2020 to 2023. The Introduction from Radiation Oncology (IROC) lecture series from the Radiation Oncology Education Collaborative Study Group (ROECSG) was implemented in 2020 at our institution. During the lecture, questions were asked through the Poll Everywhere platform. In 2023, a follow-up escape room was developed using the Google Drive platform.2 Follow-up survey was done after the escape room using Google Forms.

Results: 10 unique residents were involved during the study period. There was a trend for improvement in testing scores by residents except for 2023 (65.5%, 78.8%, 78.3%, 60%), which may be due to lack of senior residents in our program in 2023. One resident said, “I enjoyed the session and discussion.” The escape room had 4 out of 5 residents (80%) complete the room. The average time was 60.5 minutes to complete. 60% of the participants found the activity useful. 80% were interested in more escape room experiences.

Conclusions: Adapting the normal PowerPoint reinforces the educational material. Different types of education processes like multiple choice or gamification of education material impact learners differently. A variety of styles may be the best approach for the current generation of learners.

References: 1 Freeman, S. et al. (2014) Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. PNAS 111 (23): 8410-8415.
2 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19OlXxHUj18lp-hnXjfCXSCemu5O3uB9HUpou1t_ouVM/present