Effectiveness of debate as a teaching method for bioethics: opinion of undergraduate students after a class session

Abstract

Teaching bioethics to healthcare students is a difficult task principally because the academic curriculum is very rigorous and the belief in most students, staff and administration is that it is not important for enhancing their career. In our ongoing endeavors of innovative way of teaching Bioethics, we attempted at understanding the opinion of undergraduate students on effectiveness of debate as an effective mode of teaching bioethics in a class room session. Students who volunteered to take part in the debate were requested to speak for and against a bioethical issue which in this case was body image and cosmetic surgery. The other students were participants and observed the proceedings. In the end a structured questionnaire was provided to all students and their opinion was sought on the usefulness of debate as a teaching method in the area of bioethics. The results from this study indicated that debate was enjoyable (54.8), helps maintain attention in class (87.68) and effective in conveying ethical issues (64.39). The other important aspect was that 53.43% students felt that debate was better than the conventional class room teaching for bioethics. As far as the authors are aware of this is the first study that addresses the usefulness of skit as a teaching method and believe that it could be an effective addendum to conventional teaching method in bioethics and needs to be appropriately incorporated.