We have no reason to expect any relationship between e-module preparation and students' assignment to OSCE stations.
However, for practical reasons such a design would not be possible as it would imply randomly assigning half of the students to an e-module preparation condition, and the other half to a text based condition.
As this comparison included different OSCE stations (different skills), we needed to corroborate these results by investigating OSCE scores of the same skills that moved from text based preparation to e-module preparation between 2012 and 2013 (between cohorts comparison).
For 332 students we had two station scores with different preparation: one station with text based preparation and one with e-module preparation.
Because at our OSCE, students were non-systematically assigned to the stations, it could occur that a student was examined on: two stations which both had text based preparation, two stations which both had e-module preparation, or one station with text based preparation and one station with e-module preparation.
The system has two modules: an offline preparation module and an online recommendation module.
We found after further analysis of our data that in this comparison, skills with e-module preparation were more often tested first than skills with text based preparation and hence, these latter skills had a somewhat higher probability of not being completed by a student because of lack of time, which might result in poorer performance.
A between cohort comparison of scores before and after introduction of mandatory e-module preparation (same set of stations).
The within-subject comparison showed a station average of 3.50 ± 0.68 for the stations with a text based preparation and an average of 3.60 ± 0.66 for stations with an e-module preparation.
We compared students' performance, both within and between cohorts, for skill stations which had e-module preparation versus skill stations with text based preparation.
Because in 2011 2012 only four stations had e-module preparation, we had few data to compare the results of stations that had e-module preparation in both 2011 2012 and 2012 2013.
