Interactive ‘Audio-Visual’ Symposium: An Effective Mode of Health Education

Interactive ‘audio-visual’ symposium is considered an effective mode of health education. The use of clickers in pre-test and post-test helps to maximise audience participation, thereby enabling one to assess the efficacy of the symposium.

To assess the efficacy of an interactive audio-visual symposium by using clickers (Student Response Systems) in pre-test and post-test evaluation.

110 members in the audience, which included undergraduate and post-graduate medical students and faculty from different departments of our institute, were provided clickers. The symposium was conducted by three speakers, all of whom delivered their lecture with the help of Power Point presentations, thereby making it an ‘audio-visual’ symposium. Pre-test and a post-test were conducted to assess the efficacy of the symposium by administering seven multiple choice questions. Each member of the audience used clickers to respond to the same multiple choice questions asked in the pre-test and post-test. Mean, standard deviation (SD), proportions and paired t-test were used for statistical analysis and p< 0.05 was considered significant.

The mean (SD) score of the participants was 3.1 (0.64) in the pre-test and 5.4 (0.78) in the post-test. The difference between the mean scores of pre-test and post-test was 2.3, at 95% level of significance, which was statistically significant (P< 0.05).

This study showed that an interactive ‘audio-visual’ symposium with the use of clickers is an effective mode of health education by ensuring maximum audience participation in the pre-test and the post-test.