When your audience is a group of highly trained professionals, how do you convince them that perhaps they don’t know something they should know? This is the challenge of medical education. Arbor Scientia Group meets this challenge in a unique way that utilizes the science of communication for the communication of science. Communication science and our own research have shown that not all educational approaches are equal in their ability to capture the attention of adult audiences, establish a clear knowledge gap, and achieve retention of new information. Our approach to every educational initiative is based on a few fundamental principles that tackle these challenges head on.
One of the most fundamental tools in medical education is the slide deck, yet so often slide decks are not designed to maximize audience learning and retention. Throughout human history, the most basic ways to make information memorable have been through storytelling, pictures, and songs. Storytelling provides a framework for retention of new information. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is a common saying, but despite its ubiquitous nature, medical education often fails to implement this most basic principle to convey a message. Our slide decks are designed to give an audience the framework they need to incorporate new information as part of a visual story. And occasionally, we even use songs to help make key messages easier to retain.
If your goal is to teach your audience, you must first tell them what they need to learn, right? Surprisingly, it isn’t that simple. Communication science tells us the best way to capture the attention of an adult audience, especially an audience of skilled medical professionals, is to let them self-discover their knowledge gap. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to begin with a question. When you ask a question, your audience has no choice but to determine for themselves if they know the answer. If they discover they don’t know the answer, not only have you captured their attention, but you have also established a knowledge gap they will feel compelled to close. This is why we recommend that key opinion leader, or KOL, videos begin with a key question. A question rapidly establishes the topic of your video, captures attention, and identifies a knowledge gap to be filled. When you follow this up with a short video, audiences retain the information and feel their time was valued.
Learning is a process, not an event. True assimilation of new information at a level that results in behavior change doesn’t occur in a single event. To change behavior, you must have a great deal of confidence in your knowledge of a new subject. There are only a few educational strategies that achieve the level of retention necessary for this kind of confidence. In addition to visual storytelling, interval learning and activity-based learning significantly increase levels of retention. We focus specifically on these types of learning modalities in our unique evening symposia dinner programs and online learning courses. Our evening symposia dinner programs take dinner meetings to the next level. We utilize audience response systems to determine what attendees knew when they arrived and what they learned during the program. Managing these metrics is critical to ensure you know your educational initiatives are moving the needle. In addition to the presentation with audience response questions, we always incorporate multiple formats at various intervals for the audience to interact with the information, including activities to solidify learning. This may include a patient or caregiver perspective, a trivia game, group discussions, or practice utilizing a medical device. Our online learning courses allow participants to test their knowledge pre- and post-lesson and incorporate self-directed learning and interactivity to boost retention.
