An impact on medical student knowledge outcomes after replacing peer lectures with small group discussions

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Active learning has been proven as an effective teaching method that increases students' academic performance, satisfaction, and promotes life-long learning. A previous study showed that a peer lecture was time-consuming for both faculty members and students without any increase in knowledge outcome achievement of students when comparing to faculty lectures. Therefore, we replaced all peer teachings, taught in 2015, with faculty lectures and small group discussions in an organ-system part which focused mainly on applications of medical microbiology in 2016. The organ-system part was further divided into 3 sections according to type of organ systems. The knowledge outcome achievement was compared using MCQ scores. Peer lectures were mainly used as a teaching method only in 2015 (91.5%, 43 hours from a total of 47 hours) while none of them was used in 2016. On the other hand, SDG were mainly used as a teaching method only in 2016 (73.9%, 51 hours from a total of 69 hours). Students of 2016 had significantly higher average MCQ scores than those of 2015 only in the section 3 (80.8% as compared with 60.5%; p value < 0.001). There was no significant difference in section 1, section 2, and overall MCQ scores. Apart from routine teaching preparation, there was no out-of-class preparation time for faculty lectures and SGD while peer teaching required at least 0.5-2 hours of extra out-of-class preparation time from at least 1 faculty member and 10-12 students per 1 hour of teaching. In conclusion, SGD provided equal or more knowledge outcome achievement of the student with less time-consuming than peer lecture. Therefore, at least in our teaching environment, SGD was proved to be a better option than a peer lecture for teaching applications of medical microbiology.