Innovative Assessment and Learning in a Problem Based Environment
المؤلف:
Larry W. Belbeck & Shucui Jiang & Nicoleta Nutiu
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P229-C20
2025-07-09
407
Innovative Assessment and Learning in a Problem Based Environment
The overall hypothesis was to determine if traditional small group teaching with five or six students could be applied to a larger class size of approximately forty students while retaining the benefits of a small tutorial group.
The outcome was evaluated by retention of information, the ability to solve problems rapidly as a group, and to acquire the professional skills of practicing health professionals.
The challenges involved in developing this course and the rationale for it included the following: Students remember about thirty or forty percent of the information after a few months after initial learning; information becomes more meaningful when students see relevance to information (Bligh, 2000) and faculty were reluctant to make dramatic changes from either traditional lectures or small group tutorials.
The pedagogic format of the course was to provide students with as many opportunities as possible to interact with information, to interact with each other, and to provide a positive learning environment driven by a desire for excellence rather than by marks alone. In other words, to show that excellence can be achieved through other incentives besides marks.
Conversely, learning the clinical reasoning process can be shaped by a reward of marks to encourage both individual reflection and group discussion. This was achieved by awarding marks for information submitted after a more formal evaluation to provide an incentive to further pursue the case both individually and in groups.
This provided much greater learning than when the cases were simply reviewed for the students by an instructor.
The Medical School at McMaster University was the first to have a curriculum which was entirely problem-based studied in tutorial groups. Traditionally, tutorial groups comprised six or seven students with a faculty tutor and often a co-tutor. This was an extremely faculty intensive process especially when the same faculty were involved in the clinical teaching and administration associated with the program.
The approach described here allows one faculty member to offer a very similar problem-based format to a class of currently seventy students.
Problem-based learning has been incorporated into the medical curriculum of most universities. In addition, the interpretivist approach has been used both at McMaster University and many others. These are often termed "Inquiry Courses" and are based upon students learning by dealing with more open-ended questions and problems.
Since the practice of medicine involves both specific information and a number of social and reasoning skills, a positivist or quantitative assessment is included in the final assessment of students. This combination of both positivist and interpretivist assessment is becoming the norm in medical education in North America, reflecting the diversity of knowledge and personal skills required by a practicing physician.
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