Role‐play: An innovative immune response simulation session enhances understanding of abstract principles of immunology

Abstract

Undergraduate medical education is moving towards engaging students in active learning as opposed to heavily relying on traditional lecture based pedagogy. Immunology is a complex discipline to comprehend and most entering medical students have little to no prior knowledge of this intricate discipline. We developed a novel hands‐on “immune response simulation” session to engage students in active learning of immunological principles and improve integration with medical microbiology.Students are taught didactic immunology lectures followed by this active learning session where groups of students utilize their immunology knowledge to stimulate an immune response scenario to five major classes of pathogens. Students prepare short enactments playing roles of a host immune cell or a pathogen. Faculty facilitates this learning session and administers the assessment tools. The session outcomes are evaluated by administering pre‐ and post‐immunology tests.Preliminary results indicate that there is a significant increase in immunology knowledge gained and that students were highly engaged in learning immunology through this innovative pedagogy. Our results indicate that Immune response simulation is an effective pedagogical novelty where students are actively engaged in learning complex immunological principles in a fun, hands on experiential learning session. This novel pedagogical intervention might prove valuable in engaging students in learning other physiological principles.Support or Funding InformationNo funding was received for this project.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.