Appraisal of a novel pedagogical approach to demonstrating neuromuscular transmission to medical students.

Although traditional didactic lecturing is the principal instructional approach used in numerous medical schools, this method has several limitations. Experiential learning approaches place students in the center of the learning process and creates a positive and supportive classroom learning environment. In this article, we propose an active pedagogical approach for teaching a basic physiology concept, namely, neuromuscular transmission (NMT), and we evaluate the effectiveness of this approach among undergraduate medical students. One-hundred forty-two undergraduate medical students were involved in this study (, = 62; , = 80). received a didactic lecture on NMT and subsequently tested their knowledge of the topic via , after which their perceptions of didactic lectures were recorded. The students were then asked to participate in a touch-and-go (TAG) active-learning session regarding NMT, after which their learning was subsequently tested by taking . Their perceptions about the TAG game were also recorded. Students in were first administered regarding NMT. Then, they were asked to attend a didactic lecture blended with a TAG active-learning session, after which was administered, and their perceptions were recorded. Both the didactic lecture and active learning sessions facilitated student learning regarding the concepts involved in NMT. A comparison of the lecture followed by the game used in with the game blended lecture used in revealed no significant differences. However, both formats created a positive influence on students' interest in learning the concept, and the students preferred active learning over didactic sessions alone.