BMC Medical Education · Published 2026-07-30 · DOI 10.1186/s12909-026-09997-9
Christian Bernhard-Skala, Bernhard Steinweg
Abstract Background Medical education research acknowledges “P2P-teaching” as an effective, scalable, and cost-effective possibility for educating students in human medicine. At the same time, the medical field is yet to form an empirically founded and overarching description of necessary P2P-teaching competencies across medical subjects. In order to create an overarching picture of relevant student P2P-teaching competencies in medical education, this article raises the question, “What are the relevant teaching competencies in qualification measures for P2P-teachers in medical education?”. Method We performed a systematic mapping review. Our search strategy applied the PICOS-Scheme and the semantic fields “student tutor”, “qualification”, “competency”, “medical” and “empirical” to medical and educational databases, over the period from July to November 2024. A snowballing-system enriched the results, and a selection process according to PRISMA systematically reduced search results from 322 down to 18 peer-review articles for in-depth analysis. This final sample includes peer-reviewed studies from North America, Europe and Australia, drawing from many medical disciplines and published in English and German. For synthesis, we extracted key study characteristics and qualitatively analyzed contents of qualification measures for P2P-teachers. Results The analysis brings three medical and 12 student P2P-teaching competencies to the fore. Together these competencies form a competency-profile for student P2P-teachers. The competency-profile shows overlaps with relevant medical teaching frameworks. The relevant studies not only show a weak grounding of P2P-teaching research in learning and teaching theories, but also that they tend to be limited to low levels of evidence. Conclusions Our results are limited to the peer-reviewed and English- and German discourse. This specific discourse on P2P-teaching does not show an overarching consensus as to what the focal competencies for student P2P-teachers are, but it shows a remarkable number of implicit and explicit overlaps. Therefore, the P2P-teaching competency-profile for student tutors might serve as a starting point for (and invitation to) an open-discussion across medical schools to create and elaborate on an interrelated evidence-based research strategy on P2P-teacher-training. Against the background of the current state of research methodology, systematically investigating competencies of student P2P-teachers is a fruitful research area.
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Bernhard-Skala, C., Steinweg, B. (2026). Towards a standardized competency-profile for peer-to-peer-teachers in medical education - a systematic mapping review. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-09997-9