Enhancing engagement of graduate students in class via use of an interactive teaching platform improves learning and long-term retention

Abstract

Abstract Engagement of students in the classroom has been shown to improve understanding and retention of material. However, the most common teaching format in Graduate, Medical or Dental School is lecturing via powerpoint, which minimally engages students, an issue amplified during the pandemic due to remote teaching. Assessing previous knowledge, predicting/retrieving information, and using academic games are teaching strategies that facilitate more effective learning. We used TopHat, an interactive teaching platform allowing integration of these strategies, to teach a graduate Immunology course. Two cohorts of first-year graduate students were provided with the opportunity to anonymously discuss topics learned during the current or previous sessions, hear different perspectives, and correct what they had not understood during face-to-face or virtual sessions. Only some instructors in the course used the platform. Students who perform overall at a lower level obtained higher exam scores with instructors who used the platform. However, all students received higher scores on comprehensive final exam questions provided by instructors who used the platform, suggesting that engaging graduate students in class helped with long-term retention. Lastly, a student survey about the utility of the platform indicated that a large majority of students felt more engaged, and believed that they were better able to understand the material and retrieve the information both short-term and long-term. This study suggests that using an interactive teaching platform with graduate students resulted in better engagement, improved learning and long-term material retention, and could be easily implemented at any level of Immunology education.