premed PBL question

What are your thoughts on PBL? If you are in a PBL program and doing well, what type of personality do you have? If you don't like it, why?

The reason I ask is that I think I might like PBL, I just don't know very much about it (or even which schools offer it).

I absolutely learn best when confronted with specific cases which force me to learn and then apply that knowledge to the problem. I even think I might have an over-reliance on experience for learning - if the information does not come in a real life situation, I have an extremely hard time remembering it.

But isn't everyone like that to some degree? Isn't residency just a very long PBL program where the problems are real patients?

On the other hand, I've heard PBL programs sometimes just let you fly off on your own, without lecture or even much contact with faculty. I don't have specific examples, just complaints I've read on SDN. Is this really true? Because if it is, I doubt I would thrive in that kind of environment.

I guess what I'm trying to find out is, how do I know if I would thrive in a PBL program? Would just about everybody do okay in a PBL program and just adapt to it? Or are there specific people for which PBL rocks?

And which are the best programs?

Do a search - it's really tough to compare b/c nobody ever goes through both systems from scratch. It's a very personal decision.

My program has a small PBL aspect which I enjoy, but I don't think I'd want to have much more than that. It's good to get in and think critically every week, but to try to get every detail and aspect of a med school curriculum into a PBL case would be impossible and to try to learn these things independently would just be painful.

I've heard all kinds of things - some people say that PBL students they've rotated with thought better . . . but some have said that they haven't seen a difference . . . others have said that they are great on the surface, but can't go deeper on problems . . . my conclusion from this is that it's probably not better or worse - just different. Everything in med school seems to be what you make of it. In case you didn't notice, I'm still a pre-med so take from that what you'd like.

brianmartin said:

What are your thoughts on PBL? If you are in a PBL program and doing well, what type of personality do you have? If you don't like it, why?

Click to expand...

This will answer all your questions:

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un4ULrgVYMY[/YOUTUBE]

ugh, SDN you are failing me!

I am pre-med so I don't have much room to speak but I have also been interested because I think PBL would be the closest to the study style I had in HS as a homeschooler- but here is the thoughts of a doctor that is the partner of the doctor I shadow

He says the students who come out of PBL programs are really good at clinical medicine but from his experience they struggled with test like the Step 1 exam and the boards because they learn the material to solve a case and not to test on it...

Not sure if that helps but it did make me question what kind of program I want to go into.

Why couldn't they have let me keep this in the med student forum....

my school has some PBL...and for the most part almost everyone sees it as a waste of time. Stupid gunners act like its the greatest thing, but its lame. Pretty much the video was slightly exaggerrated, but based on truth (thats why its funny). You go over some dumb case, and then come up with a differential.

Sometimes you are pre-assigned to present something, which in that case everyone else is either dozing off or on their laptops doing something else. I personally think TBL is huge waste of time.

No matter what you have to learn the material for Step 1, so TBL might be better for some than lecture, but no matter what your going to have to sit down with the material and understand/memorize it on your own. TBL takes precious study time away, so TBL sucks.

You want to really learn something, then go shadow or volunteer in clinics...then at least you're seeing actual patients while you pretend to be doctor.

If you are able to gain acceptance to a school that gives you a choice between PBL and traditional coursework, it would be a good idea to talk with the students who are participating in these two curricula. Most schools have some version of PBL integrated with a traditional curriculum and again, the participates are your best source of information.

Some people hate PBL because of poor facilitators, poor resources and an inability to translate learning by PBL into a passing score on Board Exams. Some people love PBL because when done correctly, it's an active learning situation where you can often retain more information more efficiently than sitting in a lecture hall. Again, it's not a good "fit" for every student.

Things to ask about a PBL curriculum is definitely board pass rate of the students. The other thing that is important in a PBL-based curriculum is rotation of groups. You don't want to be in the same PBL group for two years straight for all of your coursework. The group dynamics that start out can often hinder some groups so a change either with every learning block or at least every semester is a better option.

Most people can adapt readily to PBL but some can't and you need to have the option of moving to a more traditional course presentation if you just cannot adapt. You don't want to find yourself in a learning situation that is so counter to your learning style that you fail.

brianmartin said:

What are your thoughts on PBL? If you are in a PBL program and doing well, what type of personality do you have? If you don't like it, why?

The reason I ask is that I think I might like PBL, I just don't know very much about it (or even which schools offer it).

I absolutely learn best when confronted with specific cases which force me to learn and then apply that knowledge to the problem. I even think I might have an over-reliance on experience for learning - if the information does not come in a real life situation, I have an extremely hard time remembering it.

But isn't everyone like that to some degree? Isn't residency just a very long PBL program where the problems are real patients?

On the other hand, I've heard PBL programs sometimes just let you fly off on your own, without lecture or even much contact with faculty. I don't have specific examples, just complaints I've read on SDN. Is this really true? Because if it is, I doubt I would thrive in that kind of environment.

I guess what I'm trying to find out is, how do I know if I would thrive in a PBL program? Would just about everybody do okay in a PBL program and just adapt to it? Or are there specific people for which PBL rocks?

And which are the best programs?

Click to expand...

I go to CCLCM, which is part PBL (six hours per week) and part seminar (eight hours per week) during years 1 and 2. I think how much you will like PBL is partly related to your personality, but also hugely related to how PBL is done at your school. A lot of schools have added PBL on to whatever their previous curriculum was that was not designed for PBL. People even get graded for their PBL participation at a lot of schools, and it takes away from people's time to study for tests. I think that is why you see so many complaints about PBL on SDN. I'd probably hate PBL too if it was done like that. At CCLCM, our PBL sessions and seminars are integrated together, and we don't have exams, so there is not that sense of taking away time from "real" learning. I think the way we do PBL is great, and I definitely learn way more from PBL than I do from seminars. I wrote another post about it once in allo if you want to read it: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showpost.php?p=5306330&postcount=29

Also, I wrote a post explaining about PBL in my blog: http://cclcmstudent.blogspot.com/2006/11/faq-17-can-you-explain-what-exactly-is.html There are some links in there to websites that can tell you more about PBL and give you a better idea of what it's like.

In response to the people who claim that PBL students do worse on the boards, this is not substantiated in the academic literature. Studies done on the subject show that PBL and traditional students do about the same on the boards If you go to my allo post, I linked a few studies that show no difference in boards performance and also gave stats from CCLCM's first class. No official Step 1 stats have been released yet for the second class, but rumor is that they did even better than the first class.

My school has a fair amount of PBL (about 6-10 hours a week of "tutorial," maybe 5 of "minicase" which is also a small group, plus varying amounts of lecture and lab)

Applying to med school, I was dead-set on going someplace with PBL, because I don't learn at all by being talked at and listening passively (ie from lecture). The idea of talking through problems and engaging with the material was very appealing.

My actual experience with tutorial is that it's a mixed bag. When you get a good one, it can be great, but it depends a lot on the dynamic. We have a new group for each course block, and they've ranged from really engaging and fun, to each member of the group giving a 10-minute mini-lecture on all the topics that come up in the case. The latter is painful.

Also, now that I'm a second year and studying for the boards, even a good tutorial can wind up feeling pretty low-yield. To be fair, though, lecture feels low-yield too.

I don't think I'm being very coherent... but I guess my big point is that PBL has its ups and downs, and isn't exactly what I imagined it would be like. Ultimately I'm still glad it's a component of our curriculum, and think it generally makes me feel like my education is better rounded. Feel free to PM me to discuss more!

I'm with the people on here who say it can be good and bad, depending on the facilitators and how you are evaluated on tests. A school in my state is a 100% pbl, and everyone there loves it for the simple reason the sessions are very small, they have complete access to professors during and anytime after their sessions, and the exams are oriented in a board fashion. The school is known for taking students with mcat scores below the national matriculant average and then have their board scores meet or exceed the national average. I'd say do your homework and see what the people's opinions are at the school. It can probably be a very helpful way to lean if done correctly, or horrible if not.

The biggest problem I had with PBL is that it attendance was required. If I wasn't getting anything out of a lecture, I could leave, but you'd have to sit there for two hours even if you were getting nothing out of it. And often enough, you don't get anything out of it -- poor facilitators, unprepared classmates, unprepared me... at least one of which was bound to be operative on any given day.

Another thing is that didactic learning has been done for centuries because it is a highly efficient way of passing on a core body of knowledge. You're going to learn to think like a doctor on the wards, and no amount of PBL is going to prepare you for that. But in order to think like a doctor, you have to know a bunch of facts. As it happens, it's much easier for someone who has already been through the process to figure out what is important and what is a useless detail. So, having an MD filter through GI physiology and figure out that you need to know X, Y and Z is much better than having some second year med student doing the same. They'll be wrong a lot of the time, and you'll waste a lot of time sifting through primary sources trying to figure something out.

That said, having an hour or two per day of small group learning (PBL, team based learning, recitation, tutorial, whatever you call it) is good because it'll give you a chance to actively process the information and ask quesitons you don't feel comfortable asking in class.
Anka