Surgical Jeopardy: Play to Learn

Abstract

Background: General Surgery residencies use protected education time in various fashions in order to optimize content quality and yield for their learners. This knowledge is tested annually with the American Board for Surgery In-Training Examination (ABSITE) exam and is used to evaluate several aspects of a resident. We hypothesized that using a jeopardy game in educational conference would encourage residents to engage in self-learning and improve ABSITE scores at a single institution.

Materials and methods: At a single institution, during protected education conference, residents played an hour-long surgical jeopardy game every 7 wk to summarize high yield topics discussed during the previous 6 wk of didactic learning. A 5-point Likert survey was completed by general surgery residents to discern the utility of the game format for learning. The ABSITE category scores were also evaluated from the year before and the year after the game was implemented.

Results: Twenty-four general surgery residents took the survey with >80% agreeing that the jeopardy format was either a fun or an effective way to learn general surgery topics. Additionally, over 80% of residents thought the game format helped with retention of knowledge. ABSITE categories that had a jeopardy session improved from 65.9% to 70.4% correct (P = 0.0003). ABSITE categories that did not have dedicated jeopardy had a non-significant increase in scores (67.7%-69.9%, P = 0.1).

Conclusions: Implementing surgical jeopardy as a component of educational conferences in general surgery resident training is correlated with improvement of ABSITE scores. Surgical jeopardy may be easily adopted and implemented to stimulate self-directed learning for residents.

Keywords: Surgery curriculum; Surgical education; Surgical jeopardy.

Figure 1.

An example game board from a Trauma Jeopardy session. Five questions in each of 6 topics were organized with ascending monetary values. The entertaining titles corresponded to the following general surgery topics, “The Drip”- Cardiac Physiology/Monitoring, “K.O.”- Head Trauma, “Going Cordless”- Spinal Cord Injury, “Pain in the Neck”- Penetrating Neck Injury.

Figure 2.

Boxplot depicting the change in ABSITE category scores from 2018 to 2019. Diamonds represents mean values; median values are represented by the middle horizontal line and are bound by the interquartile range from the first quartile to the third quartile. The lines extending from the boxes depict the full range of scores. Categories that had corresponding jeopardy sessions had a significant increase in percent correct from 65.9% to 70.4%, represented by asterisks (p=0.0003). Categories that did not have dedicated jeopardy sessions did not have a significant increase in scores (67.7% to 69.9%, p=0.1).