Introduction:

The cardiac auscultation performance of newly graduated physicians is below expectations, which results in excessive referrals to cardiologists, requests for unnecessary tests and delays in diagnosis. The development of effective teaching methodologies is necessary to improve cardiac auscultation and the diagnostic capacity of newly graduated physicians.

Methods:

56 students from the 4th year of Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, participated in an experimental study to compare the effectiveness of the pedagogical model based on the worked example methodology when compared to the traditional methodology of lectures on pediatric cardiac auscultation. The students were randomized into an experimental group and a control group and evaluated in different phases - pre-test, immediate post-test and later post-test.

Results:

From the Analysis of Variance of Repeated Measures, there was a significant effect observed in both training methods when considering the study phase (p < 0.001). Both groups obtained similar performances regardless of the training method (p = 0.863).

Conclusion:

This study suggests that an active methodology can be as effective as a traditional methodology in teaching and learning Pediatric Cardiac Auscultation.

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