THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A COMPUTER-AIDED-INSTRUCTION COURSEWARE DEVELOPED USING INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA CONCEPTS FOR TEACHING PHASE-III MD STUDENTS

A prospective study on 64 final-year MD students who failed in their p re-test MCQ examination on admission to the Paediatric Cardiology Bloc k was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of an innovative compute r-assisted instruction (CRT) courseware developed using interactive mu ltimedia concepts. Students were randomly divided into two groups and were taught by either conventional lecture (Group A) or using the CAI multimedia courseware (Group B). They were required to sit for a post- test MCQ assessment immediately after exposure to the different teachi ng methods. There was no significant difference in the mean pre-test s cores between Group A (37.4 +/- 9.1) and Group B (40.3 +/- 9.7). The r esults showed that 81.3% of students in Group B passed the post-test c ompared with 40.6% in Group A. Both groups showed significant improvem ent in their mean post-test scores compared with their respective mean pre-test scores. However, students taught using the CRT multimedia co urseware did significantly better than students taught using the conve ntional method This study suggests that CAI multimedia may be a more e ffective method for teaching cardiovascular subjects which required dy namic illustrations, such as Tetralogy of Fallot.