Quiz as an adjunctive modality in teaching Clinical Microbiology for Undergraduate Medical Students

Abstract

Conventional teaching modalities like Didactic lectures if practised alone fails to transfer concepts as effectively as active learning approaches. Active learning methods like Quizzing leads to active participatory involvement of students, motivates them by increasing interest in the subject and act as a driving force for more effective learning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Quiz as an adjunctive teaching modality in clinical microbiology for undergraduate medical teaching and to compare it with conventional teaching methods like Didactic lectures. In this interventional study conducted in the Dept. of Microbiology of a Govt. Medical College of Central India, Second MBBS students were divided into two groups. The topic Universal precautions was split and covered through two modules. One module was administered through lecture to one group and through Self study followed by Quiz to another group. Cross over was done for the second module. To evaluate the students performance pretest and post test were conducted for both the methods. In case of both the groups a significant absolute learning gain was observed for both the modalities. However in both the groups the learning gain and effect size were towards much higher side for Quizzing as compared to didactic lectures. Our study has shown the positive impetus of the active teaching learning modalities like Quizzing on self directed learning, and an added advantage of this approach on the learning gain as compared to the conventional teaching.