Perception about student-led seminars among undergraduate students of a government medical college in Visakhapatnam: a cross-sectional study

Abstract

Background: Teaching in India is still controlled by teacher-centered class room which would make them bored and exhausted. Educators now strive to provide the most productive class room experience for their students by facilitating small group discussions within the larger class such as seminar presentation by the students etc. Hence the present study was done to assess the perception of medical students regarding seminars in the curriculum towards a small group teaching activity. Objective is to assess the perception of medical students regarding seminars as a teaching learning activity. Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted among 4th semester undergraduate medical students of Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh in the month of June 2016 to assess their perception regarding seminars in the curriculum. A pre-designed, pre-tested self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data. Results: Total number of study participants were 136. Majority 110 (80.9%) of them agreed that seminar is a good academic activity and is helpful in learning. Around 96 (70%) of the students opined that seminars help students engage in higher order thinking tasks. Majority 93.4% agreed that seminars help students to overcome nervousness. About 91.9% felt seminars improve self-confidence and personality development. Conclusions: Students view that, seminars are more effective in deep understanding of the subject and critical thinking than didactic lectures and helps the students to improve self confidence and communication skills.

Perception of Second-Year Undergraduate Medical Students on Seminar as a Teaching-Learning Method

“…The lowest advantage was for helps in additional information (67%) and creates enthusiasm/creates excitement (71.5%). These findings are similar to other studies [3,7,8]. In the present study, most of the students (93.1%) believed that seminar is interactive and student centric method and are more interesting and non-boring which also aids in good learning.…”

“…As CBME is mainly student-centered learning, it has suggested adopting various other teaching learning methods, other than didactic lectures such as self-directed learning, small group discussions, case studies, seminar presentation by the students, role playing, problembased learning, demonstrations through videotapes, and visiting to field trips. These methods focus on all the three domains of learning such as cognitive, skill, and emotion [3,4]. The seminar method is considered as one of the most advanced and technical teaching-learning methods, which is commonly used in professional education.…”

Student-led seminar as a teaching learning technique to introduce first year medical undergraduate students to self-directed learning

“…The respondents found the new teaching learning technique interesting and were able to learn not only the topic but also communication, public speaking, leadership and team-work skills. Similar results have been reported previously by Haritha et al, Patel et al and Sabbani et al [7][8][9] When students are asked to present a topic in a seminar, it encourages them to research and read about the topic thoroughly, thereby improving the learning outcomes. In our study, some respondents felt that the method was time consuming.…”

Summative program evaluation of a Student-Led Seminar Series in the subject of physiology: an outcome-based study

“…Similar to our findings of level 2 of Kirkpatrick’s model, a study conducted for assessing the perception of the medical students about seminars in the curriculum compared to conventional teaching-learning activity showed seminars to be more effective in a deep understanding of the subject along with improving self-confidence and communication skills among the students [ 13 ].…”