Comparison of Traditional Non-Interactive Tutorial and Interactive Small Group Discussion (SGD) in Pharmacology

Introduction: With the increasing changes in teaching trends, students prefer to learn with interactive teaching instead of traditional one-way teaching lectures and tutorials. Objectives: investigate the comparative role of traditional tutorial and small group discussion on student’s learning. Methods:This is a cross sectional questionnaire-based study, conducted in Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics of Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Medical and Dental College for a period of 1 week. Ninety students of pharmacology department were selected for this study. For tutorial 3 batches of 30 students were taught for 2 hours, whereas for SGD each batch was further subdivided into three batches of 10 students per group.  A validated questionnaire was given to students after each teaching strategy. All the students who were present and willing to participate in this study were included. Results: In our study > 70% students found SGD to be interactive, had better learning, relevant to the topic, improved their confidence level and they were better able to solve the problems. Conclusions: SGD is better way of conducting a tutorial as compared to traditional way, in which no of students per group is much bigger. Students find it more interactive, therefore staff should be trained to conduct SGD on regular basis.