Field and Classroom Instruction to AMP Students in Community Medicine and its Effect on Cognitive Ability

Abstract

The hypotheses tested were that para-medical Assistant Medical Practitioner (AMP) students could develop cognitive ability as effectively from ‘distance’ instruction in the field provided by health department staff as from (a) classroom instructions by University lecturers or (b) a combination of classroom and field instruction. The entire batch of AMP students were divided into three stratified and randomly matched groups. The study included the pre-test/post-test and counterbalanced designs (with rotation of groups). Achievement in cognitive ability in respect of three instructional topics in community medicine–environmental awareness, maternal health and child health were studied using three instructional methods, namely classroom instruction only (C), field instruction only (F), classroom instruction followed by field instruction (C & F) were evaluated. Assessment was by selection type objective tests of the true-false form. The results showed that the groups were statistically equivalent on pretest scores. The post-test scores showed that the F group did not differ significantly from the other groups (p>0.05) in child health. In respect of maternal health the F group did not differ significantly from the C group (p>0.05), but had a mean score significantly less than the C and F group (p<0.05). In respect of environmental awareness the mean score of the F group was significantly lower than the other two groups (p<0.01). The experimental results do not support the generalisation that field instruction only could be the sole method of instruction as the ideal method of developing the cognitive ability in the topics studied.