A Comparative Study on Students’ Performance Using Two Teaching Methodologies in Practical Classes

The practical demonstration classes are becoming more challenging for the faculty to captivate the attentionof all the students. To engage the students in the post lunch session of Physiology practical was felt necessaryand also to increase the students attention span and improve their concentration in the post lunch sessionof Physiology practical classes. The need to sensitize the students to listen to these didactic lectures in theform of introducing Problem based case scenarios (PBL) was felt important. The students were divided intotwo groups, namely control (traditional teaching) and interactive (PBL) groups. The examinations of cranialnerves were divided into two sessions (Cranial nerve 1-6 and 7-12) as PBL I and PBL II and there wascrossing over of groups for the second session in order to avoid selection bias and also that both the groupsare exposed to PBL. After each session evaluation was done by OSPE. Feedback was obtained to knowabout student’s perception. Difference in mean score were analysed by paired t test and compared withintwo groups. The interactive group performed better in the OSPE in the PBL I and PBL II sessions with themean of 28.8 (SD = 8.4, N=50) and 34.6 (SD = 4.6, N=48)respectively. The two-tailed P value was alsosignificant (.019932) and (<.00001) in both groups respectively. The student feedback on analysis revealedthat above 80% of students preferred PBL and motivated towards self-directed learning. Above 90% foundit to be interesting.