Effectiveness of teaching methods in a medical institute: perceptions of medical students to teaching aids

To discover the most effective mode of teaching from the perspective of medical students and to analyse their preferences for various pedagogical aids.

The qualitative, descriptive survey designed as a cross-sectional study was conducted at the King Edward Medical University, Lahore, from April to June 2011. A 25-item questionnaire regarding perceptions towards teaching aids was handed out to 500 undergraduate medical students and the answers were analysed using SPSS 17.

Of the 500 questionnaires, 8 (1.6%) were left out for being incomplete.The study sample size, as such, was 492 with a response rate of 98.4%. Out of the 492 students, 325 (66%) disagreed that the whole lecture should be delivered via PowerPoint slides.To understand complex concepts, 246 (50%) approved of animation based learning. For retaining and recalling facts, the combination of PowerPoint slides and animations was considered by 157 (32%) as most effective, while transparencies were considered to be the least effective (n=5; 1%). Regarding their attention span 357 (76%) students said they experienced the lowest attention span during Overhead Projector lectures. Irrespective of the method used, 225 (46%) students responded that visual aids of any sort increased their concentration 'a lot'. For small groups, 283 (58%) students considered blackboards optimal, while for a large group, 243 (49%) students considered animations to be optimal. As far as combinations went, 291 (59%) preferred blackboard plus animations, 148 (30%) preferred blackboard plus PowerPoint.

The combination of animations alongside blackboard was preferred over other combinations. The subjects wanted animations to be incorporated frequently into medical pedagogy, while overhead projectors were clearly disliked by them.