Effects of Teacher-Centered Teaching and Peer Teaching Methods on Improving Some Clinical Skills of Midwifery Students: A Comparative Study

One of the new methods of teaching is peer teaching. Although it has been applied to various contexts, its efficacy has gained little attention in midwifery education especially in clinical skills. Therefore, this study examined the effect of peer teaching on learning some clinical skills among midwifery students.
This two-group experimental study was performed on 52 third-semester midwifery students in Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz Branch who were selected randomly and assigned to two groups of teacher-based and peer teaching. The clinical skills under study were vaginal examination, Leopold’s maneuvers and surgical suturing. Data collection tool was a skill checklist which was completed based on interviews and observations before and after training. It was designed following Taylor's Clinical Nursing Skills and other reliable midwifery books and checked for validity and reliability. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent t-test and Mann-Whitney U test.
No significant difference was found between two groups regarding the mean scores of vaginal examination (p=0.12), Leopold’s maneuvers (p=0.36) and surgical suturing (p=0.81) skills before the training. The two groups showed no significant difference in the mean scores of vaginal examination (p=0.73), Leopold’s maneuvers (p=0.49) and surgical suturing (p=0.94) skills after the training.
The results showed that the practical skills score of peer teaching group was similar to that of teacher-centered group indicating that peer education can be as effective as the other method. Therefore, it is suggested to use senior students as peers in clinical skills centers for teaching clinical skills to midwifery students.