MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Teaching embryology to medical students

Many methods can be used to engage students when teaching in a large lecture theatre, but it is difficult to ensure that the whole audience is involved. More gregarious students (particularly in medicine) tend to stand out when throwing questions to the group or when giving short tasks. Quieter students often have less involvement and it can be awkward to involve them without picking on them specifically. Embryology is often a complex subject, taught in ten lectures to first years, because we work both temporally and spatially, jumping around from system to system from week to week, and it is difficult to gauge how much information students take froma lecture before their summative exams. We also teach anatomy in a small group environment and link embryology to their anatomical and paediatric studies.

Our approach

We tried using an interactive voting system from Turning Technologies.¹ At the start of the series we outlined the plan for a series of quizzes (including four questions based upon material from the lecture and one question from outside the lecture) to the students, to be held at the end of each embryology lecture. We introduced the Turning Point remote devices, and students took them randomly to encourage anonymity and full participation. The students agreed to compete as 2 teams: boys versus girls.

We used the software to easily produce quick, multiple choice questions, to separate the students into 2 teams, and to show the score as it developed. After each question we reproduced questions from the lecture to show to the students why they were right or wrong and reinforce their understanding. The result of each quiz was to be posted to a blog where a running total kept the teams up-to-date.

The outcomes

Students became very animated and noisy when we switched over from lecture to quiz mode. Their posture changed and almost all of them appeared to become very focused on the task.With each question and answer they became more involved and noisier as they discovered whether they were right or wrong. As the voting was anonymous, no student knew whether their neighbours had given the right or wrong answer unless they discussed it with them.

The tougher questions produced discussion within the teams as to which was the correct answer, making them recall, think and explain their reasoning to each other.

After each question we reviewed slides from the lecture that explained the right answer, enabling me to reinforce the learning of the whole group of either core or difficult concepts often prompting questions from the group.

After four questions the scores revealed which team was in the lead, provoking more noise and friendly accusations of cheating. The result of the fifth question rarely changed the overall result but students appeared to work exceptionally hard on this final question, particularly as it usually required knowledge from outside the lecture.

As the lecturer I was given immediate feedback by the results charts and could see what proportion of the students in the lecture chose the right or wrong options. I was often surprised by how well they had picked up tricky ideas or remembered detailed descriptions, particularly when it had often appeared that many of the students had been half-asleep during these sections of the lecture. If a large proportion of the group (nevermore than 25%) had failed to grasp an area of learning I was able to immediately re-cover that material in a different way.

Did it work?

The use of an interactive voting system has been very helpful in getting all students engaged with a lecture, in motivating students to listen (and to a small extent, to prepare for a lecture) and in indicating to the lecturer how well the students have understood the topic. It has also helped highlight and reinforce important or difficult areas of study.

The students have enjoyed the series of lectures and the quizzes. Long days of consecutive lectures are common in undergraduate medicine, and breaking up these lectures with exercises like this have been helpful and fun.We intend to continue with this method and hope that the feedback from students will encourage other lecturers in the School of Medicine to use this technology for similar or quite different tasks within large group lectures.

At the time of writing the boys are trailing 3:5 to the girls with 2 lectures to play.