Progress and assessment of a contextualized teaching session of pharmacology

Abstract

Background: Learning transfer, in medical teaching, remains an essential question and optimizing it is the main preoccupation of every trainer in medical sciences. Some learning methods showed their efficacy as the contextualized learning in the framework of a professional activity or in a situation recalling it in a realistic manner. The aim of our study was to describe steps of planning and progress of a session of clarification, illustration, application et participation (CIAP) of pharmacology teaching students from second cycle of medical studies (DCEM) and to assess the session.
Methods: We performed a descriptive transversal study in April 2017 in the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis. Our work was composed of two parts. The first part consisted in a description of the preparation and the progress of the CIAP session entitled antiepileptic drugs, which is comprised in the pharmacology teaching of the certificate of Neurology to the students of DCEM. The second part consisted in an assessment of knowledge acquisition and the progress of the session by the students.
Results: We proceeded to a planning of the session which resulted in a contextualized teaching and induced an active participation and an interactivity of the students. Comparison of the results of the pretest and the posttest showed a statistically significant difference in terms of good responses. The assessment of the session progress was good.
Conclusion: Our study demonstrated the feasibility of a session of contextualized teaching session or CIAP of pharmacology and its input in terms of knowledge to the students.