Effectiveness of medical escape room on learning of undergraduate medical students in comparison with case-based learning in teaching of clinical dermatology

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of medical escape room on learning of undergraduate medical students in comparison with case-based learning (CBL) in teaching of clinical dermatology. Methodology: This quantitative experimental study was conducted at Department of Dermatology, Islamic International Medical College and included 97 students from 4th year MBBS during Dermatology clerkship. Through randomized purposive sampling, 48 students were assigned to group A and 49 to group B. A pre-test of 10 Short Answer Questions (SAQs) was taken from both groups before teaching. The group A students were taught through medical escape room strategy and group B through CBL for two weeks. A post-test of 10 SAQs was taken from both groups at the end. Results: The Shapiro-wilk test showed non-normal distribution of data (< 0.5) hence median of the test scores was calculated. The median of pre-test score in group A was 58 with IQR of 16 while in group B it was 56 with IQR of 20.5. The increase in median of post-test score of group A was 86 with IQR 19.2 and in group B it was 83 with IQR 13.5. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank test showed significance of association between the performance of two groups (p = 0.000). The percent increase in performance of students in medical escape room group was also comparatively higher than the CBL group (48.3% vs. 48.2%), respectively. Conclusion: Medical escape room is an effective teaching strategy for learning of undergraduate medical students in comparison to CBL.