The Comparison of Traditional and Integrated Teaching to Assess Learning and Academic Outcome of First year MBBS Students

Abstract

Background: Many new trends are being adopted in medical education to achieve outcome-based teaching with integrated teaching method, is one of them. The students trained with such an integrated curriculum make more accurate diagnosis than did students trained in conventional curriculum. Objectives: To compare the efficacy of traditional and integrated teaching methods and to analyze their perception towards integrated teaching. Methods: It is a cross over study with first year students as subjects. Two groups of students were taught the same topics by different methods i.e., integrated teaching and traditional methods. The procedure was repeated for another topic while the student groups were switched over between the 2 methods Efficacy of methods was compared by comparing MCQ based tests scores. Results: Students taught by integrated method scored better than those in the traditional lecture (p = 0.03 for lecture 1 & p=0.08 for lecture 2). Students found integrated teaching interesting and useful. But they preferred traditional teaching for exam preparations. Conclusion: Integrated teaching is an impressive and effective tool to teach core concepts as well as clinically applicable concepts. Concepts need to be kept confined to the syllabus.