Rote Learning Experience Pak Armed Forces Med J 2015; 65(4): 510-14 510 EFFECT OF EXTENSIVE ROTE LEARNING EXPERIENCE ON SUBSEQUENT ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT Javed Iqbal, Amina Ahmad* Quaid-e-Azam Medical College Bahawalpur, Pakistan *College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSP) Pakistan ABSTRACT Objective: To determine the difference between academic achievements in terms of scores of students with prior extensive rote memorization experience with those without it. Study Design: Ex-post fecto study Place and Duration of Study : Quaid-e-Azam Medical College, Bahawalpur from Dec 2013 to Mar 2014. Participants and M ethods: After Quaid-e-Azam Medical College’s ethical review board’s approval, scores of medical students’ first professional examination were selected by purposive sampling technique, making a total sample size of 102 students, constituting 2 comparison groups with 51 students in each. The first group comprised all the students of 3 rd , 4 th and 5 th year MBBS who were Hafiz-e-Quran and the other one had non Hafiz-e-Quran students from the same year. Descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation of their scores were calculated. Results: The overall mean score in biochemistry, physiology and anatomy was statistically different for these two groups as mean scores were 730.25±50.66 and 699.94±48.93 (p = 0.003) respectively for hafiz-e-Quran and non-hafiz-e-Quran. This was because of significant difference in achievement of score in physiology as mean score was 258.47±24.36 and 248.98±20.60 for hafiz-e-Quran and non-hafiz-e-Quran respectively (p = 0.036). The difference in the subject of anatomy and biochemistry was not statistically significant. Conclusion: Prior training of rote learning may provide experience to learn and reproduce bigger chunks of knowledge more effectively Keywords: Academic achievements, Medical students, Medical education, Rote learning. INTRODUCTION Rote learning is defined as repeated rehearsal of verbal material. This, results in small amounts of information to be transferred from short-term to long-term memory e.g. telephone numbers, e-mail addresses etc 1 . The process of rote learning fixes the information in the memory through sheer repetition. It is generally, not considered to be a favoured learning strategy. The students with such learning styles are considered to be surface learners. However, it can be argued that rote- memorization through rehearsal is the necessary step to recall important information, which paves the way to understanding and subsequent higher order cognitive skills such as analysis and problem solving 2 . Some students use rote learning as their main learning strategy. Entwistle and Peterson identified three subgroups of students with diverse learning conceptions 3 . Students who strongly equate learning with to seek understanding were labeled as constructive learner. Those who equate learning with memorizing were labeled as reproductive learners. The third group possesses mixed conception of learning. For them, the understanding and memorizing were mutually enhancing processes. The study concluded that these identified learning conceptions result in the adoption of different study strategies, which in turn lead to varied academic results. Research on rote memorization has shown that a prolonged period of repetitive rote memorization may lead to improvements in verbal/ episodic memory, which persists in the weeks following the cessation of exercise of rote learning. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that these benefits appear to be associated with metabolic changes produced by repetitive rote memorization in the left posterior hippocampus 4 . These metabolic changes are demonstrated as increased Correspondence: Dr Javed Iqbal, 60-A, Hashami Gardens, Bahawalpur, Pakistan Email: surgeonjaved@hotmail.com Received: 30 May 2014; received revised: 22 July 2014; accepted: 16 Sep 2014 Original Article