Effectiveness of teaching methods in a medical institute: perceptions of medical students to teaching aids

Objectives: to discover the most effective mode of teaching from the perspective of medical students and to analyse their preferences for various pedagogical aids. methods: the qualitative, descriptive survey designed as a cross-sectional study was conducted at the king edward medical university, lahore, from april to june 2011. a 25-item questionnaire regarding perceptions towards teaching aids was handed out to 500 undergraduate medical students and the answers were analysed using spss 17. results: of the 500 questionnaires, 8 (1.6%) were left out for being incomplete. the study sample size, as such, was 492 with a response rate of 98.4%. out of the 492 students, 325 (66%) disagreed that the whole lecture should be delivered via powerpoint slides. to understand complex concepts, 246 (50%) approved of animation based learning. for retaining and recalling facts, the combination of powerpoint slides and animations was considered by 157 (32%)as most effective, while transparencies were considered to be the least effective (n=5; 1%). regarding their attention span 357 (76%) students said they experienced the lowest attention span during overhead projector lectures. irrespective of the method used, 225 (46%) students responded that visual aids of any sort increased their concentration 'a lot'. for small groups, 283 (58%) students considered blackboards optimal, while for a large group, 243 (49%) students considered animations to be optimal. as far as combinations went, 291 (59%) preferred blackboard plus animations, 148 (30%) preferred blackboard plus powerpoint.conclusion: the combination of animations alongside blackboard was preferred over other combinations. thesubjects wanted animations to be incorporated frequently into medical pedagogy, while overhead projectors wereclearly disliked by them.