PBL

PBL = problem-based learning

We offer PBL in year 2 and year 3 medicine. Our PBL is based on the one used at the McMaster University in Canada. Why did we choose that model? I don't know but it was in place before my time. I have never studied the McMaster model nor seen it in action; I merely followed what I am told to do at PBL.

The Medical Education department is in charge of seeing that we execute PBL properly at the school. However, there was no assessment of students at PBL for a long time (~20 years) until someone visited Texas ANM University (?) and brought back the assessment system for us to implement (again without fully understanding the pros and cons for PBL assessment). Students may remember the scoring system used: 1-4 for participation at PBL. To me this scoring is absolutely irrelevant in our PBL system.

Today, I found a good article that explains how students themselves can evaluate how well they have performed at PBL. There is what is called an expert system pre-operated by professionals (specialists and experienced physicians). This is the link:

http://www.mcgill.ca/files/edu-acsrg/CogAnalysisofClinicalDiscourse.pdf

The above article is very good and I hope lecturers and medical schools that wish to implement PBL in their curriculum will study the paper first, and then decide.

As for researchers who are looking into electronic PBL (e-PBL), the same paper does give some ideas for POI (point of investigation) which can be built into an intelligent system. We were researching e-PBL till someone from the medical education department thought it was against PBL procedure to be doing such thing and we were told to scrape the idea of e-PBL (that was what we did, scraped e-PBL). But the paper above provides strong reasons why we should proceed with e-PBL.

I would like to highlight that for the purpose of clinical PBL, the best choice would be to deploy interested clinicians as facilitators (and omit the non clinicians). Non clinicians cannot stand in as facilitators for clinical PBL; it would be unfair to the students. The perpetual problem of forcing non clinicians to do PBL in medical school is unethical on the part of the administrators.

Other articles:
Google "problem-solving in medicine".