Anatomy education through mobile learning compering to lecture is more effective on medicine student's knowledge retention

Learning via mobile, as a new stage of electronic learning development, has been introduced to provide opportunities for transferring information and improving students learning that its role has not defined in medical education clearly. Present study was carried out to compare the effects of anatomy education through lecture and mobile learning on medicine students’ learning and knowledge retention. This quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest design, conducted on 62 medicine students at Busheher University of Medical Sciences on 2013. Students were selected through census method and randomly divided into control group (instructed by lecture) and experimental group (instructed by mobile) and after pretest, received education. To collect data, an achievement test was used which included 30 questions in three levels of knowledge, apprehension and application. The effects of training were measure immediately after training and 4 weeks later. Data were analyzed through repeated measure ANOVA and independent t-tests with SPSS19 software. The mean and standard deviation of scores in all learning levels in the lecture group before, immediately after and 4 weeks after training were respectively 12.03±2.822, 21.10±3.294 and 19.30±4.01 (P<0.001) and were 14.3±3.706, 21.13±4.416 and 21.33±3.177 in the mobile learning group. No significant difference was observed between the groups in the post-test(P=0.1), but a significant difference (P=0.03) demonstrated the effectiveness of mobile learning in the recall stage. Both methods are effective ways to improve learning and retention scores of medicine students in anatomy course but education through mobile is more effective in retaining.