New instructional strategies needed.

The word Lecture according to Webster's Dictionary is " an insructional discourse given by a member of the college or university faculty ". Another meaning it has is " the act of reading ". This is exactly what some members of teaching staff do. Read out their notes. These notes are then faithfully transferred to the notebooks of the students. According to one wit during this process of transfer of notes from that of the teacher to that of the students no lasting impression is left in the minds of either party. The modern version of the story is about a famous professor of one of the leading universities of United States who was often called away on Out of town engagements. To make up for his absence he decided to record all of his lectures on tapes and asked his assistant to play the appropriate lecture whenever he was not there. One day his out of town trip was cancelled at the last minute and so he decided to go to his class. On nearing the classroom he heard his own voice giving the lecture and was quite pleased that his assistant was doing his job conscientiously. When he entered the classroom he found that there was the tape recorder on the podium playing his lecture and on the student benches there were a series of other tape recorders recording his talk. There was no one in the classroom, only the tape recorders. Without a discourse or some interaction between the lecturer and the students, a lecture is a monologue which is easily replaced by a tape recorder or a photostat copy. Unfortunately this is what is happening in most of the classrooms of our medical colleges. In this issue of the Journal there is a report of a study on the effectiveness of the lecture method conducted at Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore 1 in which 74% of the students stated that the lectures were not beneficial and only 12% reported that they were attentive throughout the lecture. What is even more disturbing, is the fact, that after one month only 20% of the students could correctly recall 50% of the lecture content. The rapid development of new information in the biomedical field is another factor that is eroding the sanctity of traditional lectures. Gone are the days when the lecture notes of the grandfather could still be …