Co-teaching: Exploring an Alternative for Integrated Curriculum

Currently, the curriculum of medical education is compartmentalized which makes achieving the expected outcome, a real challenge. Co-teaching, an existing concept in education, however, may be used in medical education for integrating the applied component while basic concepts are being taught. The hypothesis, "can co-teaching be an alternate for an integrated curriculum?" was explored in this study. Therefore, the present study was designed to compare the outcomes of co-teaching with the existing teaching methodology owing to the absence of integrated curriculum.

Co-teaching and conventional modules of topics Diabetes mellitus (DM) and Alcohol and liver disease (AL), were prepared and validated. 100 under graduate medical students were randomly assigned to groups A and B. Group A was taught DM by Conventional teaching (CT) and AL by Integrated Co-teaching (ICT) and Group B was taught DM by ICT and AL by CT. A knowledge assessment tool of 20 multiple choice items was administered to assess the pre, post and retention knowledge scores. Change between knowledge scores was analyzed using inferential statistics.

Both conventional and co-teaching were significantly effective in increasing the knowledge scores (p = 0.0001) with no significant difference in learning outcomes (p = 0.59) between the two. However, co-teaching showed better knowledge retention compared to conventional teaching (p = 0.008).

Co-teaching could be considered as a substitute for integrated curriculum as it enabled comparatively better retention of knowledge as revealed by the findings.