Comparison of academic performance of medical undergraduate students between routine class room teaching and online assisted teaching in biochemistry during COVID pandemic

Abstract

The new curriculum of competency based medical education (CBME) implemented for phase1 medical undergraduates could not go on to completion due to the sudden outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The educational institutions therefore resorted to online teaching modalities over conventional class room teachings. Hence this study aimed to compare the academic performance of students between routine classroom teaching and online assisted teaching with assignments.94 phase 1 MBBS students admitted in the year 2019–2020 was divided into low (<50%), medium (51%–70%) and high performers (71%–100%) based on the average marks in the initial formative assessments. Academic performance of students in three types of teaching modalities namely classroom teaching (CRT), classroom teaching with assignment (CRA), and online assisted teaching (OAT) were compared using ANOVA. Wilcoxon signed ranks test was used to find the difference in marks between CRT and CRA which was calculated as gain 1 and that between OAT and CRT is gain 2. Out of 94 students, 19 were low performers, 53 were medium performers and 22 were high performers when grouped at baseline. All these groups performed significantly well with OAT compared to CRT and CRA. The overall performance of girls was found to be significantly higher. There was no significant difference between Gain 1 and Gain 2. All group of students scored high in assessments following online teaching compared to conventional classroom teaching. The gain of online teaching did not outweigh the conventional teaching methods implying that face to face lectures is still an effective teaching modality.