This paper considers the multiple discourses that influence medical education with a focus on the discourses of competence and caring. Discourses of competence are largely constituted through, and related to, biomedical and clinical issues whereas discourses of caring generally focus on social concerns. These discourses are not necessarily equal…

Medical education helps ensure doctors acquire skills and knowledge needed to care for patients. However, resident duty hour restrictions have impacted time residents have for medical education, leaving resident educators searching for innovative options for effective medical education. Classroom situated e-learning, a blended learning delivery…

This study aimed to identify salient problem characteristics perceived by students in problem-based curricula. To this end, reflective essays from biomedical students (N = 34) on characteristics of good problems were text-analyzed. Students identified eleven characteristics, of which they found the extent to which the problem leads to desired…

This paper describes a tutorial programme developed at the University of Western Australia (UWA) to enhance medical students' learning processes within problem-based learning contexts. The programme encourages students to use more effective learning approaches by scaffolding the development of effective problem-solving strategies, and by reducing…

Alfaisal University is a new medical school in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that matriculates eligible students directly from high school and requires them to participate in a hybrid problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. PBL is a well-established student-centered approach, and the authors have sought to examine if a student-centered,…

It has become increasingly apparent that no single method for teaching anatomy is able to provide supremacy over another. In an effort to consolidate and enhance learning, a modernized anatomy curriculum was devised by attempting to take advantage of and maximize the benefits from different teaching methods. Both the more traditional approaches to…

Basic and superior reasoning skills are woven into the clinical reasoning process just as they are used to solve any problem. As clinical reasoning is the central competence of medical education, development of these reasoning skills should occur throughout the undergraduate medical curriculum. The authors describe here a method of teaching…

The curriculum of our medical school has a hybrid structure including both traditional training (lectures) and problem-based learning (PBL) applications. The purpose of this study was to determine the learning styles of our medical students and investigate the relation of learning styles with each of satisfaction with different instruction methods…

The goal of this study is to examine how to facilitate cross-cultural groups in problem-based learning (PBL) using online digital tools and videos. The PBL consisted of two video-based cases used to trigger student-learning issues about giving bad news to HIV-positive patients. Mixed groups of medical students from Canada and Hong Kong worked with…

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been introduced to medical schools around the world and has increasingly become a popular pedagogical technique in Asian countries since 1990. Gross anatomy is a fundamental basic science course in virtually all medical training programs, and the methods used to teach it are under frequent scrutiny and revision.…

Integrated learning is the need of the hour. We at Shifa College of Medicine switched to an integrated modular curriculum last year. In the present article, we describe our experience with the renal module in year 2 of a 5-yr undergraduate medical curriculum. A multidisciplinary renal modular team developed the relevant objectives, themes, and…

Students are relying on technology for learning more than ever, and educators need to adapt to facilitate student learning. High-fidelity patient simulators (HFPS) are usually reserved for the clinical years of medical education and are geared to improve clinical decision skills, teamwork, and patient safety. Finding ways to incorporate HFPS into…

The purpose of the present study was to determine the coping strategies of medical students and to investigate the effects of coping strategies on student satisfaction and academic achievement with different instruction methods. A total of 152 medical students was followed throughout the first 2 yr of medical education between 2008 and 2010.…

Pathology and anatomy are both sciences that contribute to the foundations of a successful medical career. In the past decade, medical education has undergone profound changes with the development of a core curriculum combined with student selected components. There has been a shift from discipline-based teaching towards problem-based learning.…

This paper presents results of a study conducted with undergraduate students involved in either problem- or project-based curricula (Medicine and Engineering, respectively) at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada. The objective of the present research was to measure the impact of these innovative curricula on students' engagement and persistence…