Comparison of flipped and traditional lecture-based classrooms for Kampo (traditional Japanese medicine) education in a medical school

Abstract

Flipped classroom teaching (FC), one of the active learning methods, has been shown to be more effective than traditional lecture-based classroom teaching (TC) in a variety of fields. We have previously reported the usefulness of FC in a undergraduate 'Kampo Medicine (traditional Japanese medicine)' mandatory course, conducted in 2015. However, it was a pilot study and the results were based only on students' subjective evaluations. Therefore, in this study, we have developed the FC program, and implemented FC, and compared it with TC. In the annual year 2018 (AY 2018), the common cold class was implemented as FC model and the women's health class as TC; in AY 2019, all classes were implemented as TC. Between the cohorts, we compared subjective outcomes, as well as objective outcomes. Among the subjective evaluations, the explanatory ability of Kampo characteristics, indications and pharmacological effects were significantly higher in the FC than that in TC. Also, the knowledge retention was higher in FC. Objective evaluation showed that both class attendance and exam scores were significantly higher in FC. The FC model developed in this study has been shown to be effective, however, we planned the further study with multiple institutions in near future.

Keywords

• Kampo
• Traditional medicine
• Flipped classroom
• E-learning
• Medical school