• Jonny R Stephens, Samuel Hall, Matheus Gesteira Andrade, and Scott Border.
• Division of Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine, Centre for Learning Anatomical Sciences, University of Southampton, Mailpoint 845, South Academic Block, Tremona Road, Southampton, SO16 6YD, UK. jonny08@hotmail.co.uk.
• Surg Radiol Anat. 2016 Dec 1; 38 (10): 1217-1223.

PurposeNear-peer teaching (NPT) is a highly valuable resource for the education of medical undergraduates with benefits to the students, teachers themselves, and the faculty. To maximise the effectiveness of such teaching programmes, the aim of this study was to determine how the student learning experience, and underpinning social and cognitive congruencies changes as the learner-teacher distance increases.MethodsSecond-year medical students at the University of Southampton participated in a series of neuroanatomy, extra-curricular revision sessions taught by the third-, fourth-, and fifth-year medical students and junior doctors. The students completed a validated questionnaire after the session rating various aspects of the teaching.ResultsAlthough all teachers delivered sessions that we rated highly with a mean perceived gain in knowledge of 18 % amongst all students, it was found that the third- and fourth-year medical students delivered a session that was rated significantly better than the fifth-year students and junior doctors across all, but one areas of feedback.ConclusionsWe believe that these findings may be explained by the diminishing social and cognitive congruencies shared between learner and teacher with increasing distance. From our results, we hypothesise that graduation is an important threshold, where there is a significant drop in congruencies between the learner and teacher, therefore, having a significant impact on the perception of the NPT session.

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