The outcome evaluation between two different curriculum: students’ retention capacity based on comparative study in Indonesia

PURPOSE: To compare the outcome of two different curriculum in clinical pathology using students’ retention capacity. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in December 2017. There were two groups of students enrolled in clinical pathology course. A retention test therefore was conducted 5 months after the course had finished using 25 multiple choice questions –single best answer. Comparisons of means are determined by Mann-Whitney U-test using SPSS version 23.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, USA). RESULTS: A total of 280 students participated in the study of a 5-month post-course evaluation, and the average for the first group (n=138) is 10.93±3.57 while the second group (n=142) average is 8.56±3.19. The difference between the first and the second group are statistically significant (p<0.00001). CONCLUSION: The group with longer duration and more number of parallel courses had a higher retention score. Further research using retention test in different courses should be conducted to analyze which curriculum that promotes students’ understanding of medical knowledge.