Medical Education

It seems to me that medical education research is a fairly new field, but it's very interesting. We have to learn a little about how to teach small group sessions so I've been reading some articles. Although these articles are older, they appear to be expert opinion. Only recently has medical education trended towards evidence-based research, but I really don't know much about how medical education research works. Nevertheless, it seems that medical schools are moving towards small group problem based or case based learning. Indeed, when I was applying to medical school, that was the big difference between medical school curricula; some would be "traditional" lecture heavy environments while others encouraged student teaching in a smaller setting. Personally, I think different students have different learning styles and no single model of teaching works for everyone.

In interactive case-based sessions, students work through a hypothetical patient case to discuss diagnosis, pathogenesis, epidemiology, and treatment of a disease. It's great because students see how information is applied to clinical medicine. What's interesting to me is that pre-clinical curricula are emphasizing this style of learning, but clinical didactics still remain lecture-based. In my third year rotations, nearly all my teaching was done by lectures even though third year of medical school is about learning to think through patient cases. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps lectures complement the case-based learning we're already doing, or perhaps, medical school education changes are trickling down and will soon reach third year didactics. To tell the truth, my favorite third year teaching sessions involved cases where my classmates would present a case and we would discuss how we would manage those cases. Because of our greater clinical knowledge as third year clerks, those discussions tended to be much richer, more thoughtful, and more educational than a passive lecture (especially since third year rotations are so tiring).