Contreras, Nicolas

While small group learning and team‐based learning (TBL) have become widely accepted modalities in medical education, surprisingly little is known about how medical students interact between and within their learning teams and how dissection teams themselves interact with faculty or teaching assistants (TAs). This study sought to examine: (1) interactions between faculty/TAs and student teams; and (2) student table‐to‐table interactions taking place in the anatomy didactic block at Mayo Medical School. In addition, interactions between students in the same student team and overall team dynamics were examined by faculty. The purpose of this study is to understand dissection group dynamics and how these sets of interactions relate to student academic performance . The amount of time faculty/TAs spent with a group during each teaching session was recorded by students at the end of each session. The number of team‐to‐team interactions were also recorded. These values were then compared to student examination performance. Results from this study indicated that the individual time faculty/TAs spend with teams and the number of table‐to‐table interactions appeared to have no correlation with overall team academic performance. However, faculty assessment of interactions within student teams and overall team dynamics appears to be an accurate predictor of the team's overall academic performance, where groups with well‐defined leadership roles and strong cooperation between team members performed higher than those where this was not present . Support or Funding Information Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Department of Anatomy