Teaching biochemistry using flash cards

Dear Sir

Kusurkar et al. (2011) state that we must “make an attempt to understand what students want out of the teaching sessions and structure the format of teaching around these needs. This is to make the learning more relevant, intriguing and interesting, thus stimulating among the students a genuine interest in the subject ….” Based on this principle, the aim of our study was to involve Indian medical students in preparing biochemistry flash cards, and to determine their attitudes regarding the usefulness of this intervention for studying biochemistry. This was a single-group, post-test study conducted in 2011 and 2012 of 100 MBBS students who were divided into 20 groups of five students each for the purpose of developing flash cards. The students were asked to create a total of 20 flash cards that contained essential biochemistry facts supported by pertinent illustrations. The final flash cards were reviewed by the course professors and corrected for accuracy. The flash cards were then distributed to the entire class of 100 students. Finally, the students were surveyed, using items on Likert scales from 1 to 5, regarding their opinions on the usefulness of this “flash card” method for studying biochemistry. Overall, the students reported that the use of flashcards was enjoyable and created a sense of being involved in their learning. Additionally, the study author found this method to be a useful means to prepare for teaching future courses. Our findings are built upon the work by Alexandre et al. (2008) on the use of multiple tools for teaching biochemistry, which may be summarized by the proverb: tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand. We believe that the success of our method was based on the concept of having students study and create learning materials (e.g., flash cards) together in teams.