Comparison of Role-play (Expert Interview) with the Standard Seminars Teaching for the Residents: An Interventional Study

Background: Seminars offer a platform for disseminating knowledge through presentations, discussions, and interactions.They offer a structured environment for the exchange of information, where students can learn from experts, share ideas, and gain insights into various medical topics.This usually does not impart the decision-making skills that students encounter in real-time.Watching an interview as role-play may enhance learners' skills to critically appraise, in-depth knowledge, and more ways to communicate their thought process.So, to see the comparative effect of role-play where two experts played a scene of viva voce (interview) vs a seminar, this study was conducted from April 2024 to December 2024.Objective: To assess improvements in grades after teaching by role-play (interview) in comparison with standard seminar teaching of Postgraduate (PG) students.Methods: It is an interventional prospective study.Two arms had seminars and an expert interview role-play.Pre-and post-assessment was done and compared between the groups, and repeated once after 2 months to assess long-term learning.Results: The study enrolled a total of 71 participants, who were randomly allocated to the two groups: A (standard teaching-seminars) and B (intervention-expert interview).We found that in both intervention groups, there was a significant improvement in the mean scores of post-tests, with a statistically significant mean difference between the pre-and post-test scores, with a p-value of < 0.001 after applying a paired t-test across each intervention group, but the intervention is performing similarly to the traditional teaching method.When we compared long-term retention, it appears to be better in the intervention group.Conclusion: Learning by watching the discussion of experts gives more insight, and long-term retention is found to be higher in comparison with traditional teaching.Thus, bidirectional discussion of experts gives more troubleshots to the learners.