Formal evidence-based medicine instruction in Turkish undergraduate medical education: an initial evaluation

BACKGROUND: Global and national undergraduate medical education accreditation organizations recommend the inclusion of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) instructions into the medical schools’ curricula. Accordingly, some Turkish medical schools have individually developed and implemented EBM training programs, but there is no data of current programs’ effectiveness and students’ learning achievements due to the lack of a validated Turkish language EBM assessment tool. This study evaluates the effect of a newly introduced formal EBM instruction to the curriculum on students’ knowledge and skills by using the recently published Turkish adaptation of the Fresno Test. METHODS: The study is an experimental investigation using pre- and post-test evaluations. A five-week EBM course was developed according to Kern’s six-step curriculum development approach. A total of 78 students from the third (n = 30), fourth (n = 19) and fifth (n = 29) year of medical school voluntarily consented and were enrolled into the course. Overall, the Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty had a total of 555, 461, and 400 students enrolled in the third, fourth, and fifth year, respectively. The program has been evaluated based on students’ learning achievements and survey responses. RESULTS: The students’ mean pre-test Fresno Test score improved from 49.9 ± 18.2 to 118.9 ± 26.3 post-training. The Cohen’s effect size was 3.04 (95% CI, 2.6–3.5). The overall students’ satisfaction score was 8.66 ± 1.09 on a 1 to 10 scale. CONCLUSIONS: The program was effective in improving students’ knowledge and skills on EBM. We propose to offer the program as an elective course during the third year of the medical school curriculum based on all data obtained during the program evaluation.