Impact of Whatsapp in improving learning among 9th semester MBBS students
Background: Interactive Teaching learning can be used in clinical subjects like surgery for better participation of students as one-way didactic lectures do not involve active participation of students. WhatsApp is one of the most famous messaging services which everyone use and it is easy, cheaper, and faster. Objective: the purpose of the study was to study the impact of whatsapp in improving learning in general surgery among 9th semester medical students. Methods: This study was conducted among 9th semester MBBS students in Surgery department. Students were divided into group a (study group) and group b(control group) by a simple random sampling. Gastric cancer was discussed among students of both Groups through didactic teaching. after didactic teaching, only Group A students were exposed to social media type of learning, i.e., using WhatsApp, after the session a multiple-choice questionnaire having 10 MCQs was given to both groups and an additional poll was conducted among the Study-group students to assess their perception towards Whatsapp intervention. the mean score obtained by both the groups were compared with unpaired t test. P-value <0.05 is taken as statistically significant. Results: The mean (SD) score of the Study-group was 8.58(1.18) and the mean (SD) score of the Control-group was 5.41(1.32) and statistically significant difference was found between the two groups scores with a p-value less than 0.05 opinion poll found that the intervention of whatsapp among study group was effective. Conclusion: we observed that the usage of WhatsApp in addition to the didactic teaching was found advantageous and enhanced learning in undergraduate students