Continuing Medical Education Outcomes are Much More Than Statistical Significance.

Abstract

Dear Editor, An article published by the Journal of CME in 2023 by Robles and colleagues [1] reports the results of an evaluation of a continuing education programme, a free live continuing education (CE) series of activities primarily for primary care advanced practice providers offered in 2019 by a medical education company (Practicing Clinicians Exchange) and discusses the potential value of pooled samples in comparison to paired samples in examination of percentage of correct responses preand post-continuing medical education (CME). The focus of the article is statistical significance and sample size. It is well known in the research literature that statistical significance alone is not sufficient to accept that a certain set of outcomes was the result of participation in a series of educational activities. Rather, it is now regarded as necessary to report effect size as well. The effect size is the magnitude of the difference between two groups, like the preand post-groups in this study [2–4]. Robles and colleagues [1] mention effect size but do not report it. We also would like to take a step back and challenge the field to think about preand post-assessment questions serving several purposes: