Augmenting the critical care data base of junior medical students with an emergency medicine lecture curriculum: a controlled study

A mandatory lecture course in emergency medicine, consisting of 13 lectures, was given to junior medical students over 3 years at Texas Tech University Regional Academic Health Center--El Paso. The performance of the students on a 25-question pretest and posttest was compared to a statistically similar group of their classmates on geographically separate campuses of Texas Tech University School of Medicine undergoing an otherwise comparable junior year clinical curriculum. Both groups exhibited improvement in posttest scores from pretest score values; additionally, students exposed to the lecture series at Texas Tech--El Paso performed significantly higher on the posttest, compared to the other campuses. We conclude that some emergency medicine material is successfully learned by junior medical students during their required third year clerkships; however, important learning objectives within the domain of emergency medicine can be most successfully taught if a mandatory junior year lecture course in emergency medicine is also incorporated into the third year curriculum.