Lecture attendance improves success in medical physiology

The educators have underlined the importance of lecture attendance for decades. Nowadays, students have ample online educational sources, which began a debate on the necessity of in-class lectures. In the present study, we investigated the influence of lecture attendance on the exam success. To this aim, we adopted a novel approach and matched second-year medicine students' answers in three interim exams with the lectures related to those questions. Thereby, we were able to evaluate if attending lectures increases the chance of giving a correct answer to the exam question generated from the attended lecture. Furthermore, we examined students who had never taken the course before (first-time takers) and students who had failed and repeated the course (repeat takers) separately, since repeat takers may have attended a lecture previously. We found that first-time takers attended more lectures and gained higher total scores than repeat takers. Lecture-matched correct answers were significantly higher for attended lectures than for skipped lectures in all interim exams. Moreover, the correlation analyses revealed that the number of correct answers increases by lecture attendance in both first-time and repeat takers. These results indicate that in-class lectures still should be considered as an essential part of the medical physiology education, even in the internet era.