Teaching Digital Rectal Examinations to Medical Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The digital rectal examination (DRE) is a necessary part of a complete physical examination and evaluation of a patient, yet teaching of this examination to medical students is often inadequate. This study was a comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of the rectal teaching associate (RTA), lecture, role-playing, and simulated models as methods for teaching the DRE procedure to undergraduate medical students at Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty of Medicine. METHOD: A total of 65 third-year medical students were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group. Both groups received a lecture and practiced the DRE on a simulated model. The experimental group received further training from an RTA. Students completed a pre- and post-intervention knowledge assessment, an objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) measuring performance of the DRE, and a satisfaction survey. RESULTS: Mean knowledge scores increased significantly for both groups (18.73 to 22.32, p <.0001). The control group scored significantly higher on the post-intervention assessment than did the experimental group (23.11 versus 21.47, p =.025) The experimental group scored higher on the OSCE (27.52 versus 23.80, p =.001) and rated the RTA as a more effective method for learning the DRE. CONCLUSIONS: This first study using RTAs to teach the DRE as a global skill for evaluating the rectum suggests that the RTA method is effective for increasing skills and students' confidence in the procedure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".