Teaching Bayley-Pinneau to residents

Bayley-Pinneau makes more sense at the bedside than in a lecture. The next time a bone age comes back during a precepted visit, do the lookup out loud with the resident instead of quoting the number from memory.

Start with what the method needs: sex, growth tempo, current height in inches, and the scored bone age in years. Have the resident say where each input came from. The height is today's measurement. The bone age is radiology's read, not the chronological age. That distinction is the most common trainee mistake.

The tempo choice is the teaching moment. Advanced, average, and delayed each have their own table, and the same child can land on meaningfully different predictions depending on which one you pick. Ask the resident to defend their tempo call from the gap between bone age and chronological age before they enter it.

Then do the lookup. In Height Predictor that is the four inputs and a tap, with the tables on the device. The speed is the point: the table step should not eat the time you want to spend on the growth curve and the family conversation.

Before the note is signed, have the resident write down the bone-age source and reader alongside the predicted height. The prediction inherits the uncertainty of the score, and the next clinician needs to know where the number came from.

Close with the limits. Bayley-Pinneau tends to overestimate when bone age is advanced and underestimate when it is delayed, so the number is context, not a promise. If the resident can explain that to a family in one sentence, the teaching worked.

The written guides live in the pediatric medicine hub: the calculator flow, the bone-age background, the comparison with mid-parental height, and the limitations page. Send the resident there after clinic, not instead of it.