Abstract
BackgroundTeaching and learning Community-Based Medical Education (CBME) requires the active engagement of students in various activities to cover planned curricular content. CBME being multifaceted involves careful application and formation of links when attending to community health problems and public health issues. Students often depend on factual recall rather than ‘engaging in’, to counteract the broad and comprehensive nature of CBME. This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of Visual mapping techniques as a learning tool in a CBME program for the subject Community Medicine and thereby assist medical undergraduate students in overcoming identified learning challenges.MethodologyAn interventional study was conducted where medical undergraduates were randomly assigned to two different groups (each group = 30). After sensitization, a broad theme was taught to both the groups as a part of community-based teaching (CBT), each week for a month. The students in the intervention group were given the assignment to draw visual maps using the mind mapping & concept mapping techniques, after each CBT session, while the control group had Question-Answer session with built-in discussion (Conventional method) by an equally qualified, experienced faculty with no mapping assignments. A surprise written examination was conducted on the topics taught, and scores of both the groups were compared. Feedback was obtained from the intervention group.ResultsMean score of the examination by the intervention group (29.85 ± 3.22) was significantly higher than and that of the control group (23.06 ± 4.09) (t = 7.14 and p < 0.05). The students shared that the assignment of drawing mind and concept maps for topics taught helped in attempting questions of the written examination by facilitating easy recall of the information learned. It aided to frame the answers to descriptive questions in a structured way with the use of keywords. However, identifying the concepts and establishing relationship between them was slightly challenging.Conclusion‘Visual mapping’ in the form of Mind and Concept mapping was found to be an effective learning tool for multifaceted CBME especially in promoting meaningful learning and facilitating rational thinking by the medical undergraduates.
Highlights
Teaching and learning Community-Based Medical Education (CBME) requires the active engagement of students in various activities to cover planned curricular content
The students shared that the assignment of drawing mind and concept maps for topics taught helped in attempting questions of the written examination by facilitating easy recall of the information learned
Community-based teaching and learning is an important component of Community Based Medical Education (CBME), where students are supposed to understand people in their social context in a more holistic way [1]
Summary
Teaching and learning Community-Based Medical Education (CBME) requires the active engagement of students in various activities to cover planned curricular content. Community based teaching (CBT) requires students to listen, observe, organize, integrate, and correlate different concepts and domains about health and disease epidemiology. They need to acquire various clinical and public health skills etc. [2] It is essential for students to actively acquire the information, apply it and try to link different aspects of the community with the health of people residing there. Students often fall short of such a broader and comprehensive approach while dealing with community health problems or public health issues. Strategies, and data concerning national health programs & policies add up to the learning difficulties
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