Abstract

Background: The current system of pharmacology teaching in India is mostly through lectures, which is a teacher oriented, monotonous and passive way of learning and does not encourage higher order thinking or ability to critically appraise the new information. Further, the lecture-based sessions ensure that the medical students are overloaded with facts about hundreds of drugs, but they find it difficult to integrate this knowledge into clinically relevant situations or apply them to the management of patient’s illness. However, lectures are still a very important teaching-learning (TL) method especially for large group teaching and need to be continued as they are a part of curriculum in India. Hence, there is a dire need for innovative approaches to increase the effectiveness of lecture-based pharmacology teaching to MBBS students. Aims and Objectives: To study the effect of scenarios in increasing the effectiveness of lecture-based sessions in pharmacology teaching of MBBS students.
Materials and Methods: A few important chapters of pharmacology were covered through traditional lecture-based approach and the last 15 min were devoted for the discussion of scenarios relevant to the topic of the session (lecture + scenarios approach). The scenarios were prepared to ensure that they incorporate the specific learning objectives of the TL session and to also cover the major pharmacological principles of the topic. Further, these scenarios were prepared to aim for the higher levels of cognitive domain such as application, analysis, and synthesis. These lecture + scenarios sessions were compared with pure lecture-based sessions that were simultaneously conducted by other faculty members of the department.
Results: More than 90% of the students found that use of scenarios at the end of the lecture made the TL sessions more interesting, interactive, student oriented, and also helped to increase their attention span. More than 85% of the students felt that the scenarios were greatly helpful in understanding the pharmacological concepts, improved critical thinking and made them more motivated to do self- study. The attendance of the students was substantially higher for the lecture + scenario sessions (91%) as compared to the pure lecture-based sessions (80%). The students’ test scores in topics conducted by lecture + scenarios sessions were higher (62%) when compared with topics covered through pure lecture-based sessions (54%).
Conclusions: The use of scenarios at the end of lecture-based pharmacology session helps to make the lectures more interesting, interactive, relevant, and finally effective TL sessions for MBBS students.