Cultural Appropriation for Improved Knowledge Acquisition in Medical Education [Response to Letter]

Dear editor

The authors would like to thank the kind sender for taking interest in our work and for taking the time to put in some great suggestions for future work.

On behalf of the authors, we would like to extend this scientific discussion with a response that does not in any way undermine any of the opinions presented in the letter to the editor.

The kind sender spoke about the sample and whether it would have been better to extend the sample to include maybe other religious groups and maybe western samples to complement the Middle Eastern predominance of the current sample.

It is important to understand that the research subjects were chosen specifically to represent a specific culture and in order to ensure that culture was a static value not a variable it was done exclusively on a specific group with specific cultural descriptors.¹ While we do acknowledge that there might be a bias in results due to this, yet our methodology towards overcoming this bias is to extend the study on different cultures and different groups, which was mentioned in the work.

In this piece we are not studying the effect of superstition on education, otherwise the proposed broadening of the sample would have been useful. On the contrary, this is an experimental design on a specific test group.

The sender also referred to the use of a control group in the study, we think this would have been useful and will plan for it in further similar studies but, there was a variable in the questionnaire that was placed there to distinguish whether or not the learning that happened was a direct result of the intervention. This was the question that referred to whether the subjects watched the videos or not. This stratified the subjects into two groups one of which could be considered as control. It is also worth mentioning that subjects with medical background were also ruled out to endure the validity of the assumption.

A very important point was raised about the timing of the administration of the questionnaire. This is a valid important observation if we were testing knowledge retention.² The administration of the tool straight after watching the videos was intended to test knowledge acquisition as is mentioned in the title and objectives.

We believe that another follow-up study would be useful to test knowledge retention as mentioned by the sender, but this would be a total different study with different objectives.

Testing internal validity and reliability was not done, and we do acknowledge that using a validated tool would be very reasonable and important. This might be a little tricky when it comes to social experiments like the one conducted here. The test was a test for delivered information that we developed making a standardized pre-validated tool almost impossible. Nevertheless, we will use this advice.

The use of chi-square was mentioned in the letter as well. Chi-square was used to ensure the significance of the tested results. A chi-square test is a statistical test used to compare observed results with expected results. The purpose of this test is to determine if a difference between observed data and expected data is due to chance, or if it is due to a relationship between the variables you are studying. This is exactly what chi-square was used for in our study.

Finally we would like to add that the value of this work lies in the unique approach for delivering educational content. Being a social science, research in education requires a more in-depth look into methods and design rather than statistical significance.

We value all scientific opinions and understand the importance of multiple perspectives in education. This is why we feel grateful for this scientific discussion.