Physician Assistant (PA) Students, Like Many Students

¶ … Physician assistant (PA) students, like many students preparing for careers in the medical field, are required to learn a great deal of material. Given the potential costs involved in the future if a student does not retain information it is important for these students to develop a method to allow them to effectively memorize large amounts of material quickly and efficiently.

To determine whether the use of a pneumonic device will result in better initial learning and retention for new to be learned material in a group of PA students compared to a group of students who do not use a pneumonic device.

A between groups design will be utilized. Two groups of participants will be exposed to a version of the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT-original version). The participants will be randomly assigned to one of two learning conditions. Before the test is administered, one group will be given instructions on how to use pneumonic device to assist with the memorization of the words; the other group will simply be administered the test. Two different forms of the test exist, a standard and statistically equivalent alternate form. This will allow one group (the informed group) to be administered one version and the other group (the uninformed group) to be administered the alternate version of the test. Each participant will be tested singularly, in a quiet room with a desk and the experimenter according to the test protocol. This allows for determination of a learning curve for the list of words, short-term recall of the list and long-term recall of the list. The entire test session should take about 30 minutes. There is a 20 minute break between the short-term recall condition and the long-term free recall condition. During this period the experimenter will gather demographic information, ask other questions via a structured interview, and have the participant perform simple math or logic problems designed to last well beyond the delay period.

Two weeks following the initial test the participants will be asked to return under the guise of giving their impressions of the experimenter and the study and for feedback regarding the design. At this time the subjects will be asked to recall as many words as they can from the list in order better determine if the use of a pneumonic resulted in better retention of the words.

Setting

The setting is a university setting in a classroom environment. It is directly applicable to the population under consideration, university PA students.

Participants