Field and classroom instruction to AMP students in community medicine and its effect on cognitive ability.

Abstract

The hypotheses tested were that para-medical Assistant Medical Practitioner (AMP) students could develop cognitive ability as effectively from ‘distance’ instruction in the field provided by health department staff as from (a) classroom instructions by University lecturers or (b) a combination of classroom and field instruction. The entire batch of AMP students were divided into three stratified and randomly matched groups. The study included the pre-test/post-test and counterbalanced designs (with rotation of groups). Achievement in cognitive ability in respect of three instructional topics in community medicine–environmental awareness, maternal health and child health were studied using three instructional methods, namely classroom instruction only (C), field instruction only (F), classroom instruction followed by field instruction (C & F) were evaluated. Assessment was by selection type objective tests of the true-false form. The results showed that the groups were statistically equivalent on pretest s...