Surgical Jeopardy: Play to Learn

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.