Abstract

Background: The efficacy of traditional lectures has been debated. Still a predominant form of educational technique, lectures have failed to transfer concepts as effectively as active learning approaches. Innovative teaching-learning methods such as students’ seminars that can hold the attention span of the students for a longer time need to be explored. Aims and Objectives: The aim and objective of this study were to evaluate the efficacy of student seminar as a teaching-learning method in undergraduate physiology through students’ perception.
Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study conducted in a private medical college of Pune, across 3 years involving st 596 1 -year MBBS students of three academic year batches. The selected topic was divided into five subtopics to be presented in 10–12 min. Five volunteers from students presented a subtopic under a teacher’s guidance, while the non-presenting students read the topic too before attending the students’ seminar. A questionnaire containing 13 questions of both open-ended and close-ended types was designed to extract feedback from the students. The data were analyzed in Microsoft Excel.
Results: Majority of the students gave a positive feedback to various aspects of the seminar. Negative response was given to only two items in the questionnaire. Conclusion: Students’ seminar is a potentially important resource of teaching-learning method yet to be fully tapped and hence needs to be incorporated on a regular basis in the medical curriculum.