Suzette Gauvain

The Use of Student Opinion in the Quality Control of Teaching

The success of a teaching programme may be measured by a variety of criteria, such as demand, achievement in examinations, subsequent careers, and student opinion (Joyce and Weatherall, 1957). AS a criterion of measurement demand to attend may have flaws, as the objectives of the students and those of the organizers may be different. Measurement by examination success may not adequately measure the achievement of the aims of the course, which may be to change the students approach to the subject studied, especially if the examination is set by external assessors unfamiliar with these aims. However, the criteria listed have been used in a systematic study of a three-month whole-time course in occupational health held every year since 1959 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Particular attention has been given to obtaining student opinion on the organization, content, and method of instruction and using it to improve and maintain the standards of the course.

The use of a tape‐slide lecture course in teaching occupational health

Lectures recorded on tapes illustrated by slides are a well-recognized method of teaching. Harden, Lever, Dunn, Lindsay, Holroyd, and Wilson (1969) have described the use made of programmed tape-slide presentations in place of conventional lectures as part of a course in endocrinology for fourth-year medical students. They reported that the students taught in this way significantly improved their position in class and reacted favourably to the experiment. Orr (1967) described the value of tape-slide lectures as compared with live lecture presentations .in the teaching of first-aid to workers employed at the Harwell Atomic Energy Station. The class was divided into two groups, one group was taught personally by a live lecture illustrated by slides and the second by a recorded tape-slide lecture presentation. On subsequent examination no difference in performance was found between the two groups. These two assessments were undertaken on organized courses, but it seems that no assessment has been made of the teaching value of tape-slide presentations which are not replacing, or are part of, an existing conventional lecture course. In these circumstances and particularly where the tapes are borrowed for use at centres distant from the lending library, objective assessment of gains in knowledge is difficult. Useful information can be obtained, however, simply by recording the use made of presentations and the listeners’ attitude to them (Sherry, 1969). The aim of the present investigation was to ascertain the use made of a series of 13 tapeslide lecture programmes on occupational health released through the Medical Recording Service Foundation and to study the attitudes of the listeners to them. As a method of education it has the advantage that individual borrowers of tapes can listen by themselves, more than once, if they wish. The belief is held that group listening followed by discussion (organized or spontaneous) is a more effective method of teaching than listening alone. The validity of this belief requires assessment, as does the teaching value of the tape-slide presentation to the individual listener. This involves not only an assessment of the technical efficiency of tape-slide production but also the quality and content of tape-slide lectures. Objective assessment of the individual listener’s previous knowledge and the increase in knowledge gained following instruction is obviously desirable. In a supervised course this can be achieved by comparing performance in examinations given before and after the teaching course. However, i t is difficult to apply this form of assessment to unsupervised listeners. Instead, the opinion of all listeners was sought by questionnaires to be completed after listening to individual tapes and where possible after listening to the series of tape-slide lectures.