2530. TACO Tuesday as a Medical Education Tool

BACKGROUND: Novel strategies in medical education including the flipped classroom, test-enhanced learning, and gaming have proven to be effective for preclinical learners but little is known about their efficacy in post-graduate education. We implemented an educational tool in our Infectious Diseases (ID) Fellowship Training program called TACO (To Assess Cognitive Operations) Tuesday that utilizes aspects of the flipped classroom, test-enhanced learning, and gaming to improve ID fellow engagement, satisfaction, knowledge retention, and board examination preparation in association with a weekly ID core didactic curriculum. METHODS: One to three multiple choice clinical vignettes were emailed to ID fellows the day prior to their weekly didactic lecture. The first fellow to answer all questions correctly was the winner for the week. The correct answer choices along with detailed rationales were distributed to all fellows at the end of the week. After one year of using this educational tool, we surveyed fellows to evaluate its impact on their engagement with the weekly didactic sessions, self-perception of content retention, and sense of preparation for the ID board examination. RESULTS: We had a response rate of 82% with 9 of 11 fellows polled participating. Of those, two-thirds attempted to answer the multiple-choice questions prior to lecture and most (77%) reviewed the correct answer choices and rationales weekly. All participants felt the educational tool helped improve their engagement with the lectures and half felt it increased overall satisfaction with their educational experience. The majority felt the tool increased content retention and their level of preparation for the ID board examination. Implementation of this tool was associated with a higher mean IDSA in-training examination score compared with scores from the previous year (518 vs 469). CONCLUSION: ID fellows found that an educational tool utilizing a flipped classroom, test-enhanced learning, and gaming in association with a weekly core didactic curriculum increased their engagement, satisfaction, knowledge retention, and board examination preparation. Future studies will investigate the impact of this tool on knowledge retention and ID board examination scores within our institution as well as across institutions. DISCLOSURES: All authors: No reported disclosures.