Artificial Intelligence Versus Traditional Learning in a Medical School Setting

As technology advances in every aspect of our lives, educational curricula are moving away from traditional didactic lectures toward more interactive modalities. While there are many ways to incorporate non-traditional learning methods into medical curricula, the increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a novel avenue. This study aims to determine whether the use of AI enhances learning as compared to more traditional flipped classroom styles, such as lecture slides and voice-over videos.

Incoming first-year medical students were given learning materials prior to course instruction. Participating students were randomly assigned to three educational groups: PowerPoint slides only (PPT), voice-over videos and PowerPoint slides (VO+PPT), or Artificial Intelligence learning and PowerPoint slides (AI+PPT). After reviewing the materials, all study participants took a 22-question formative quiz. The average overall scores and the scores on the five most "difficult" questions were assessed between groups.

Sixty-two incoming students participated in this study. There was no significant change between groups regarding overall scores. The PPT group had significantly lower scores on the five most "difficult" questions when compared to the VO+PPT (p = 0.026) and AI+PPT (p = 0.004) groups. However, there were no significant changes in scores on the five most "difficult" questions between the VO+PPT and AI+PPT groups (p = 0.834).

The VO+PPT and AI+PPT groups performed similarly but significantly better than the PPT-only group regarding performance on "difficult" questions. Overall, our study provides evidence that Artificial Intelligence and voice-over modalities are equally viable methods of learning, depending on the demands of professors and students.