Are instructions in video format always better than photographs when learning manual techniques? The case of learning how to do sutures
Abstract
In faculties of medicine today, a growing number of medical procedures are taught in manual techniques
workshops. These workshops leave the students only very little time to train. One solution to this
problem would be to provide medical students with an opportunity to practice these skills by themselves
thanks to online learning materials. In order to determine the instruction presentation medium best
suited to complete this training, different formats were compared (video + audio, video þtext, and
photographs + text). Forty-eight students were required to do five sutures using one of these formats.
Their performance was assessed by time measurements and measurements of the quality of the knots.
For all of the time indicators, the results show that the videos were more effective than the photographs
for the first trial. This trend was reversed for the following trials, where the performance levels recorded
using the photographs were better than those using the videos. The quality of the knots, however, was
systematically better with the photographs than with the videos for all of the trials.