Peer evaluations of group work in different years of medical school and academic achievement: how are they related?

BACKGROUND: To develop the skills needed in health care teams, training communication and teamwork skills are important in medical education. Small group collaborative learning is one of the methods utilized in such trainings, and peer evaluation is suggested to be useful in reinforcing the effectiveness of group learning activities. In Mie University Faculty of Medicine, group work consisting of book review sessions of liberal arts education in the first grade and problem-based learning (PBL) sessions in preclinical years were conducted using the same peer evaluation system that included three domains: degree of prior learning, contribution to group discussion, and cooperative attitude. This study was conducted to determine the relationships among behaviors during group work and the academic achievement of medical students. METHODS: With the data from a cohort of medical students in three consecutive academic years (n = 340), peer evaluation scores in groupworks of book review sessions, those in PBL sessions and paper test scores of preclinical years were analyzed. The correlations were analyzed with Spearman’s correlation coefficient, and the respective scores were compared by using the Wilcoxon signed-ranked test. RESULTS: Significant correlations were observed among the evaluation scores of respective domains in group work and paper test scores. The degree of prior learning had the strongest relationship among the three domains (r(s) = 0.355, p < 0.001 between book review sessions and PBL; r(s) = 0.338, p < 0.001 between book review sessions and paper test score; r(s) = 0.551, p < 0.001 between PBL and paper test score). Peer evaluation scores of respective domains were found to be significantly higher in PBL. CONCLUSION: Medical students maintained their groupwork behaviors to some extent from early school to preclinical years. Those behaviors were positively related to their academic achievement in the later years of the medical education curriculum. Our study highlighted the importance of the early introduction of group work. The results will be useful to motivate medical students to put more effort into group work. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03165-5.