Effectiveness of Pre- and Post-Clinical Conferences in Improving Clinical Learning Among Midwifery Students of Jimma...

Although clinical conferences are promising clinical teaching strategy for ensuring meaningful clinical learning, they were mostly overlooked. Thus, this study aimed to assess the effectiveness of pre- and post-clinical conferences in improving clinical learning among third-year undergraduate midwifery students of Jimma University.

A quantitative institution-based pre-experimental study was performed among consecutively selected thirty-four third-year regular undergraduate midwifery students of Jimma University from February 14 to 25/2021. Data were collected by using both a self-administered questionnaire and an observational checklist. The collected data were entered into Epi_data version 4.6 and exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. To test the difference in the participants' clinical learning before and after the pre- and post-clinical conferences, a paired-samples t-test analysis was done at a 95% confidence interval and p-value <0.05. To quantify the magnitude of the intervention's effect, Eta squared was computed as an effect size statistic. The results were presented by text and tables.

There was a statistically significant improvement in the overall clinical learning score from pre-intervention (M = 8.79, SD = 4.1) to post-intervention [M = 15.65, SD = 15.65, t (33)= 8.53, p < 0.0005]. Also, the Eta squared = 0.69 indicated a large effect size.

Since pre- and post-clinical conferences resulted in improvement of clinical learning among the respondents, the routine utilization of the pre- and post-clinical conferences as an effective clinical teaching strategy should be encouraged among the midwifery clinical teachers of Jimma University.