Comparison between the Effect of Lecture and Question - answer Methods on Learning Outcome and Satisfaction of Physiology Course among Medical and Pharmacy Students

Introduction: Considering the efficiency of active teaching methods, current study is designed to compare the effect of lecture and question-answer methods on learning outcome and satisfaction of physiology course among medical and pharmacy students.

Methods: In this semi-experimental study, medical and pharmacy students which have been registered in physiology course, divided randomly into two groups. Some topics of physiology with the same content were taught for both groups. The difference was that in the test group, question-answer method was used. In the next meeting, test and control groups were displaced and the same test was performed for all students at the end of each session. Totally, 8 sessions run in this way and the average test scores in two groups were compared. We used a questionnaire to compare the student opinion about these two methods. Content validity of the questionnaire was determined and its reliability was calculated by using Cronbach's alpha.

Results: The results showed that the mean percentage of correct answers to final exam questions in test groups of medical (78±2.06%) and pharmacy students (55.02±3.89%) was significantly greater than control groups (65±2.64%, 42.41±3.22% respectively) with P value of 0.0001 and 0.018, respectively. More than 90% of students preferred this method to the traditional method. 

Conclusion: Our findings showed that using simple active question-answer method would increase students’ satisfaction and learning outcome at physiology course. Thus, we recommend using of this method for education of other basic science courses.