Flipped pedagogical approach in teaching skeletal muscle physiology for undergraduate medical students

Objectives: Medical teachers need to use different pedagogical approaches to enhance student learning. Students are exposed to the flipped classroom (FC) in addition to the other teaching approaches which may enhance the comprehension, interpretation, and analytic skills of the students. The objective of this study was to compare the test scores obtained after the FC teaching session with the test scores obtained after a traditional classroom teaching session on a topic in skeletal muscle physiology delivered to 1st-year undergraduate medical students. Materials and Methods: Twenty-one 1st-year undergraduate medical students, undergoing a musculoskeletal system module at a private medical college were involved in this study. Students in the flipped pedagogical method were required to read the notes and power-point slides provided in addition to watching the prerecorded lecture videos before class. During the class, there was a topic review session followed by a small case discussion in groups. In the traditional classroom, students were advised to attend the lectures but there were no recorded videos to watch before the session. The effectiveness of the two types of pedagogical approaches was tested through pre-test and post-test using multiple-choice questions. The students’ perception of FC was collected through a semi-structured validated questionnaire. Results: The pre-test mean score was higher for FC (5.48 ± 1.44) when compared to the traditional classroom (3.19 ± 1.4). In our study, the scores from pre-test to post-test in a traditional classroom showed statistically significant improvement (P = 0.0014) but were not statistically significant in the FC. In the flipped pedagogical approach, the difference between mean correct responses for question number 5 (P = 0.031) in pre-test and post-test was statistically significant. There was an improvement in the mean scores in all the eight questions between pre-test and post-tests in the traditional pedagogical method of teaching. About 79.6% of students agreed that they watched all the assigned videos and 78.6% of students completed reading the assigned power-point presentation slides before coming to the FC. About 78.5% agreed to learn more topics in FC format and 78.6% of students agreed that FC was more engaging and interesting in comparison to a traditional class. Conclusion: Our study showed that flipped and traditional pedagogical approaches both enhance student learning.