Maximize USMLE Pass Rates and Meet Curricular Goals: How TrueLearn and Picmonic Benefit Medical Schools

Programs looking for resources to prepare medical students for USMLE or NBME Subject Exams know that these key elements must be present: quality content, objective data, and an effective study strategy. The integrated TrueLearn-Picmonic platform delivers on all three, and more.

TrueLearn’s USMLE SmartBanks combine high-quality practice questions aligned to the exam format with cognitive science, performance analytics, longitudinal tracking, and AI algorithms to support teaching and assessment, as well as learning and board exam readiness. Additionally, Picmonic’s audio-visual mnemonics are integrated into TrueLearn questions, further building on the core tenets of learning science and complementing the brain’s natural memory-processing functions. Educators can easily integrate TrueLearn and Picmonic into lecture decks to increase engagement and obtain real-time feedback on knowledge gaps, or assign as an active learning resource alongside the curriculum. Utilization of these proven effective tools helps optimize academic hours by guiding lesson plans with objective data and helping students learn more effectively so that educators can spend less time remediating and ultimately cover more content across the curriculum.

Medical schools can leverage TrueLearn and Picmonic to achieve two critical objectives:

• maximize licensure exam pass rates, and
• arm faculty and deans with predictive data and assessment tools to ensure their curriculum meets program objectives. 

Integrate board prep into curriculum to optimize exam-readiness and outcomes

The time commitment needed for item-writing and preparing active learning experiences for students is significant, and medical school educators juggling teaching, committee service, scholarly work, clinical duties, and other professional and personal responsibilities, may find little, if any, time to facilitate such activities. With TrueLearn and Picmonic, educators can easily and seamlessly integrate board prep and active learning into the curriculum to ultimately maximize USMLE pass rates and meet curricular goals.

Leveraging TrueLearn and Picmonic within the curriculum also helps reduce the competing priorities of students: attend class or use the time to prepare for licensure exams. Modeling to students how to embrace an integrated study approach helps limit missed learning opportunities, which means faculty will spend less time remediating students. Additionally, when faculty drive exam prep through regular assessments and active learning experiences spaced throughout the curriculum, students develop continuous learning habits, crucial to their future success.

Gain meaningful insights from performance analytics and longitudinal data

The key and objective data surfaced with TrueLearn and Picmonic, provides faculty real-time performance feedback on students’ strengths and weaknesses, and learning and comprehension gaps so that at-risk students can be identified early, remediation can occur proactively, teaching can be more efficient, and optimal exam and medical school outcomes can be obtained.

TrueLearn also arms medical school leaders with longitudinal performance analytics and in-depth reporting capabilities to surface actionable insights on cohort progress, as well as spot curricular trends. With these insights, deans can effectively identify curricular gaps, set goals and track improvement.

Streamlined integration of TrueLearn and Picmonic into the curriculum and across program entirety thus delivers real-time key and objective data and longitudinal reporting that provides multiple advantages to faculty and medical school leaders: predicts exam outcomes, supports curriculum evaluation and accreditation, monitors progress of continuous improvement initiatives, uncovers faculty professional development opportunities, and more.

Support the brain’s natural functions

TrueLearn and Picmonic were built on the principles of cognitive science and leverage proven techniques such as retrieval practice, interleaving, varied practice, and spaced repetition to deliver engaged and active learning and simulated test-taking experiences.

Educators can merge resources from both platforms to enhance their lesson planning and teaching materials, accelerating students’ understanding of important topics and complex concepts. Spaced repetition, for example, has shown to be effective to help learners improve retention and recall by reviewing materials at increasing time intervals¹. This helps circumvent what Hermann Ebbinghaus hypothesized as the “Forgetting Curve”, whereby memories will fade over time unless efforts are made to retain them before the curve dips. TrueLearn and Picmonic utilize AI algorithms and data analytics to forecast when that’s likely to happen and send timely reminders to review the relevant information.

Educators can create quizzes and reading assignments centered around those materials to help students keep the curve up. At the same time, faculty can track if students are learning effectively and not foregoing attention to curriculum for exam prep, or vice-versa. This is how programs can steer optimal academic excellence, enhance first-time pass rates on USMLE exams, improve students’ chances of matching with their desired residency, and protect the institution’s reputation.

When integrated into the curriculum, the TrueLearn-Picmonic solution can have a powerful impact on medical school performance and outcomes. The two platforms deliver a science-proven methodology that empowers educators to guide students through the rigors of medical education and prepare for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK, and NBME Subject Exams.

Independent studies show that TrueLearn helps improve licensure exam performance by as much as 20% on average² and Picmonic improves long-term memory retention by 331% and increased test scores by 50%!³

Reference
¹https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732215624708
²https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjsurg.2019.02.031
³https://doi.org/10.2147/AMEP.S61875