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How do you do well in a problem based learning curriculum?
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we were entirely PBL. It works well if you're the kind of person easily bored by lectures and tend to do most of your studying on your own anyway. I read and took notes on what i was reading. You learn what is and isnt an important detail pretty quickly. If people have time to read 5x then they had time to take notes the first time and just study their notes later
PBL (or Team Based Learning - TBL) is awful. My school just started using TBLs.
Thank god I only have a few more months of this crap. TBL is the worst way to teach a massive amount of information. I cannot tell you how much I dislike it compared to reading PowerPoints or going to Lectures.
I study by reading the papers that are assigned once (no time to waste on this stupid stuff), and eating the lower grade. P=MD only now my solid pass 85%+ is harder to get because TBLs bring down my grade. 🙁
Thank god I only have a few more months of this crap. TBL is the worst way to teach a massive amount of information. I cannot tell you how much I dislike it compared to reading PowerPoints or going to Lectures.
I study by reading the papers that are assigned once (no time to waste on this stupid stuff), and eating the lower grade. P=MD only now my solid pass 85%+ is harder to get because TBLs bring down my grade. 🙁
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Could someone explain exactly why this type of learning sucks? I'm not entirely clear on how it works.
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pbl is crap. take notes premed. although if you have a good session leader then it's not as bad
i'd rather have a powerpoint slide that tells me what to learn and use it learn the material on my own time.
i'd rather have a powerpoint slide that tells me what to learn and use it learn the material on my own time.
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Oh come on now. Educate yourselves. PBL students often score better on their tests than traditionally educated students.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15947211
http://som.unm.edu/ume/ted/pdf/cur_sup/Evidence of Effectiveness of PBL.pdf
http://www.bie.org/research/study/does_pbl_work
Are you guys kidding me? You all would seriously rather be cooped up in a lecture hall for 8 hours a day? Your lecture-based undergrad education has trained you like monkeys.
In PBL we get to figure out the answers for ourselves in an active discussion with peers and the help of a faculty member who is only responsible for 5-7 of us. Coming from lecture-based undergrad education, I am learning SO much more. It's a very enjoyable and rewarding process. I get to work at my own pace and our discussions during group meetings lead to long-term evidence based memories as opposed to copy/pasting from slide to brain.
The efficacy varies from program to program. You just need to find a good, structured PBL program and you'll be more than fine.
And for you type A gunner folks, just an fyi, we have lecture sessions where we cover the most important stuff after each case, so calm down.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15947211
http://som.unm.edu/ume/ted/pdf/cur_sup/Evidence of Effectiveness of PBL.pdf
http://www.bie.org/research/study/does_pbl_work
Are you guys kidding me? You all would seriously rather be cooped up in a lecture hall for 8 hours a day? Your lecture-based undergrad education has trained you like monkeys.
In PBL we get to figure out the answers for ourselves in an active discussion with peers and the help of a faculty member who is only responsible for 5-7 of us. Coming from lecture-based undergrad education, I am learning SO much more. It's a very enjoyable and rewarding process. I get to work at my own pace and our discussions during group meetings lead to long-term evidence based memories as opposed to copy/pasting from slide to brain.
The efficacy varies from program to program. You just need to find a good, structured PBL program and you'll be more than fine.
And for you type A gunner folks, just an fyi, we have lecture sessions where we cover the most important stuff after each case, so calm down.
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As a liberal arts major who spent most of his time in seminars and discussions, I would love PBL-style learning. Fortunately we start doing it after Anatomy ends.
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Oh dear. I don't like other people enough for that to work. Great illustration!
this thread reminds me i have to give a presentation/lecture next week about abx resistance. Wtf, they pay TA's to do their job, but now they want me to study it at home and teach or colleagues while being evaluated at the same time. **** this sh it. lol I have to find me some powerpoints.
A lot of the PBL data regarding medical education is fraught with methodological flaws, such as non-randomization, using student satisfaction as a measure of effectiveness, single-school studies, etc. Surely you'll agree that people who volunteer to be the PBL arm of a study are more likely to enjoy and do well in that environment -- otherwise, why would they volunteer to be in that arm? And measuring student satisfaction with the curriculum to support PBL is as useful as using patient satisfaction scores as a valid measure of quality of care. That 2nd article you linked itself mentions how equivocal the data is -- at this point, I would not say that, definitively, PBL produces a better end-product. There's too little data regarding PBL in medical education to make that statement. Show me a well-designed, multi-school, randomized, PBL vs. lectures-alone study, with a large n, measuring objective outcomes and I'd be happy to change my mind.
I'd rather not have anything mandatory (ex. PBL sessions, lectures, etc) and learn material myself. I don't need someone to spoon-feed me every little bit of information. I'm an adult.
Also, ease up on the douchey name-calling re: "trained like monkeys." You're not exactly acting like the best advocate for PBL here by acting like a dick. You're what, 5-weeks into med school? Some of us in this thread are M3s and M4s. I hate to pull the "you're just an M1 card" (I really do!), but get a little more experience with med school before calling us monkeys and berating us for preferring lectures over PBL discussion groups. Most of us have had experience with both, since pretty much every school in the US has some sort of PBL built in now (since it's the cool thing to do these days).
Yes, because in a traditional curriculum, we don't ever discuss things with our classmates. Ever. Or do any practice problems, you know, the ones with all those clinical scenarios with questions based on the scenario. I'd rather spend an hour doing qbank questions than waste time in a "discussion" group. The former, I can truly go at my own pace. The latter, I can only go as fast as the slowest member of the group.
Also, wtf is a "long-term evidence based memory?" 😕
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so what you're saying is that a bunch of clueless first years are blundering through the material as a faculty member watches you. then you get the pertinent information in a lecture anyway. sounds good.
gl with your long term evidence based memories lol
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Thus the addition of the term "as good" to "as good or better." The point was that it's not definitively worse as multiple folks here have stated.
Haha, you still don't acknowledge that information isn't spoon fed in PBL (you do indeed "learn the material [yourself]"), which is only the entire point of my post.
On the master scale of name calling:
Douchey >/= dick >> monkey. I think that was a rather soft description of people who prematurely/blindly dismiss pedagogical alternatives...
Listen, you can be an M3, M4, M200, attending, whatever. Unless your curriculum is PBL-BASED you have no authority to say you have experience in PBL-BASED curricula. I'm not berating you, I'm calling you out. You guys may even have a 50/50 lecture/PBL curriculum... but it's not the same thing. Not even close.
Divide and conquer buddy. To put it bluntly, the pace of seven people working on an issue all at once with the help of a faculty member... reading different sources, coming with different backgrounds and skills... we go faster than you alone. It's not an argument, it's common sense.
Additionally, the fact that you use the word "waste" to describe the time I spend talking with my classmates, helping them learn, reinforcing what I understand and discovering gaps in knowledge I may have through their questions, and the personal guidance of a faculty member who has decades of med school experience on me... wow. You obviously think very highly of yourself and your priceless qbank.
Let me clarify: It's memory. The kind that is long-term (as opposite to a shorter-term kind, maybe you had a question about this distinction in your qbank?), and is based on a body of knowledge that you have carefully built and can now use to evidence your thoughts. Does that help? 🙂
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I love PBL!!!!
it's a great time for me to study in the back where the facilitator can't see what I'm actually doing under the table
That sounds dirty
even so, doing something dirty would be more productive
it's a great time for me to study in the back where the facilitator can't see what I'm actually doing under the table
That sounds dirty
even so, doing something dirty would be more productive
I think I have a good point of view of this as I spent my first year doing the traditional style of lecture learning and then the school switched to PBL/TBL. I feel that no matter what you are going to have to learn it yourselves. Looking back, I remember things from PBL that are helping me in my M3 year, but I also remember things from lectures. I also remember a lot better the things I read because I wanted to and from doing questions for practice. The one thing I can say for certain is that the video, although cheesy is kind of how I felt doing TBL's. I could have gone through the same material in half the time if they would have jus said here is clinical scenario and here are the objectives and questions. Come tomorrow and we will just go through the answers QUICKLY.
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I'm missing something. What is this obsession you all have with going faster? Why not learn the material thoroughly in one pass? Are you all just that eager to get your letters and go into some high paying specialty that involves a limited scope of knowledge?
Am I in the minority when I say that I think I actually get something out of discussion? Everyone else would rather have the knowledge a little faster and forego all that critical thinking training so they can... what? Study for boards more? Anyone who thinks time spent in discussion is essentially "wasted" is probably well enough off that they should just enjoy the freaking ride, and possible try to do something doctorly and help someone (their classmates).
On that note, my hands smell like dead people and I wanna go out. So I'm gonna go try to take care of that (the smell just never comes off!!!)
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We had a couple TBL sessions in MS1 and I hated them, thankfully there weren't that many. Basically you're assigned an article or two to read about a specific topic or maybe a lecture or two to learn on your own. You spend a couple hours preparing for it. Then you take an individual quiz on the material you should have learned. Then you take the same quiz again, but with your team. The two scores get averaged. Then they go over the quizzes. Then they have a case-based presentation on the material. So all told, that's like 4-6 hours spent learning one little specific topic that they probably would have covered in 20 minutes in lecture or even less time on your own. It's not an efficient way to learn.
I do think PBL can be beneficial, but it also depends on the group and facilitator you get.
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Exactly, because you didn't go over it in depth during PBL.
Most of the time PBL is just twice the work with half the learning.
It also does a horrible job at explaining the underlying pathophysiology of disease. Instead of learning how things happen, you spend hours looking at labs and s/s in "clinical cases" then coming up with "diagnoses" without really understanding anything.
Doing qbanks and practice questions are the same thing. They're just faster and more efficient.
Gold.
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The point of going faster is to get through the material and then move onto **** you actually enjoy doing. In the time you take to go through a single case emphasizing one or two concepts, I can memorize the MOA, toxicities and drug interactions of 50 drugs. Who is more efficient?
Being efficient with your time is 90% of med school. PBL is the anti-thesis of being efficient, hence the disdain for it. Like I said, in 90 minutes, I can pound out 50 drugs. While you learned how to read a lab report (wow it's normal or abnormal, great job generic med student!) and look **** up on wikipedia (look I'm actively learning!!!!1111), I actually got real work done and I can do the things I actually enjoy like touching my penis.
You just started M1 year. Things are probably pretty slow at the moment (relative to later on in training). Once you get a few months in, you'll realize what most of us do -- time is very precious. Managing time becomes one of the most important things you'll do (and learn) in med school. That's harder to do with mandatory classes, whether they're lectures or PBL sessions. In a traditional curriculum, I would argue that M1 year is all about learning to be super efficient in preparation for M2 year. Sure, you may get a lot out of a discussion, but many of us can do a lot more during the same amount of time it takes for one PBL session. The first 2 years of med school are all about efficiency and repetition. You're not going to retain too much 2 years from now if you only make one thorough pass.
Also, you're making a lot of assumptions. PBL doesn't have the sole rights over teaching students to think critically nor is it the only comprehensive teaching method. You're overestimating how much critical thinking is involved in the preclinical years -- this is especially true for many of the basic sciences you learn in M1 year (with physiology being one of the exceptions, obviously). Once you learn pathology, pathophysiology, clinical management, etc, things get a lot more thinking-heavy. Keep in mind that PBL has really only blown up relatively recently. Surprisingly, the attendings running medicine are not idiots, even though they learned in that traditional curriculum that forgoes all that critical thinking, as you said it. After stating something like this:
It's a little hypocritical for you to tell those of us in traditional or systems-based curricula exactly how much critical thinking we're receiving considering you're not in such a system, don't you think? And no, it isn't just like undergrad.
Like others have said though, it's simply faster for many of us to go through the material ourselves. If it helps you feel better, many of us oppose anything that's mandatory, whether it's a traditional curriculum with mandatory lecture attendance or a PBL curriculum with mandatory discussion groups. That doesn't mean we don't help out classmates or learn critical concepts or that we're greedy bastards who want to go into high paying specialties with limited scope of knowledge -- I don't even want to know where you got that little argument from. So, like I said before, ease up on the insults and the baseless statements.
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You know every single person in this thread can tell you are either a premed or MS1 just from the first two sentence of your post alone right? The obsession with time is because you run out of it as an MS2. Lack of time is what makes medicine hard.
Also, who cares about what "insight" you might gain from a bunch of equally clueless MS1's? That's pretty silly. First off the material is not intellectually deep first year. You either know it or you don't, and that's based on time invested. There aren't any exciting insights to be had. Second off you'll forget a good chunk of the first year stuff and relearn the relevant portions again.
I think the worst part of being in a 100% PBL curriculum would be working with people like you.
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i can't speak for anyone else but it takes me around 3-4 passes to learn the material reasonably well
one long, thorough pass doesn't really help
one long, thorough pass doesn't really help
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I'm now post-M2 and have some new insight. I'd like to revisit my opinion about PBL:
What I meant by the 50/50 comment is that our PBL+system-based learning is entirely different than 50/50 or lecture-based w/PBL supp in that it's a challenge to wrap your mind conceptually around everything that's going on without discussing it. You have to go study on your own with resources you pick, then come into group and see if you really made sense of it all. This kind of learning is weird because you don't have lectures to guide you until the end of the week when you've presumably already learned most of the material on your own. So it's backwards, and on top of that you're trying to learn phys+anat+histo+pharm+epi+biochem+really basic path all at once. It's overwhelming and the discussions can make you more efficient in that setting. So yeah, I'm sure if I was in a traditional-style subject-based curriculum during M1, PBL would suck. But in our position it did serve a valuable function, and that's what I tried (and failed) to convey earlier. I felt that a lot of you were commenting from the perspective of those who have done PBL but not a PBL-based curriculum, and extrapolated based on your experiences which led to some conclusions I disagreed with. Hopefully this clears things up.
During M2 however, I do agree that the value of PBL decreases significantly. There are so many good resources are out there to help lay your foundation and with your M1 background knowledge the pathophys no longer seems like rocket science, so there's not a whole lot to talk about. You are trying to be more efficient as well (I get this now haha), and PBL will never be more efficient than uworld questions.
So I'll stand by my thoughts as they pertain to an M1 PBL+systems-based curriculum. If I could go back and apply to med school again, I would want a traditional-style curriculum simply because PBL during M2 blows. If I had to do a PBL+system based curriculum all over again, I'd still rather do the group sessions as opposed to having no mandatory meetings and an almost exclusively self-directed process because in our program those discussions do help you become more efficient.
Also FWIW, our boards scores are consistently on par or above the national average, so while PBL-based is certainly a different way of learning I think it gets more flak than it deserves.
Sorry for the 2 yr necro bump but I felt I had something meaningful to add with the experience I've gained since starting med school.
What I meant by the 50/50 comment is that our PBL+system-based learning is entirely different than 50/50 or lecture-based w/PBL supp in that it's a challenge to wrap your mind conceptually around everything that's going on without discussing it. You have to go study on your own with resources you pick, then come into group and see if you really made sense of it all. This kind of learning is weird because you don't have lectures to guide you until the end of the week when you've presumably already learned most of the material on your own. So it's backwards, and on top of that you're trying to learn phys+anat+histo+pharm+epi+biochem+really basic path all at once. It's overwhelming and the discussions can make you more efficient in that setting. So yeah, I'm sure if I was in a traditional-style subject-based curriculum during M1, PBL would suck. But in our position it did serve a valuable function, and that's what I tried (and failed) to convey earlier. I felt that a lot of you were commenting from the perspective of those who have done PBL but not a PBL-based curriculum, and extrapolated based on your experiences which led to some conclusions I disagreed with. Hopefully this clears things up.
During M2 however, I do agree that the value of PBL decreases significantly. There are so many good resources are out there to help lay your foundation and with your M1 background knowledge the pathophys no longer seems like rocket science, so there's not a whole lot to talk about. You are trying to be more efficient as well (I get this now haha), and PBL will never be more efficient than uworld questions.
So I'll stand by my thoughts as they pertain to an M1 PBL+systems-based curriculum. If I could go back and apply to med school again, I would want a traditional-style curriculum simply because PBL during M2 blows. If I had to do a PBL+system based curriculum all over again, I'd still rather do the group sessions as opposed to having no mandatory meetings and an almost exclusively self-directed process because in our program those discussions do help you become more efficient.
Also FWIW, our boards scores are consistently on par or above the national average, so while PBL-based is certainly a different way of learning I think it gets more flak than it deserves.
Sorry for the 2 yr necro bump but I felt I had something meaningful to add with the experience I've gained since starting med school.
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Good ol' PBL.
Everyone has a different idea of what it is, and assume every school does it that way. So if your PBL or TBL sucks, it all must suck.
Eh. I went to a school with a well-done PBL-intensive curriculum. It worked for me because I was going to skip lecture anyway. It wasn't just busy-work like a lot of PBL sounds like at other schools.
Different strokes for different folks. The trick to success in med school is not picking the best curriculum, it's being able to adapt to whatever curriculum is in front of you.
Everyone has a different idea of what it is, and assume every school does it that way. So if your PBL or TBL sucks, it all must suck.
Eh. I went to a school with a well-done PBL-intensive curriculum. It worked for me because I was going to skip lecture anyway. It wasn't just busy-work like a lot of PBL sounds like at other schools.
Different strokes for different folks. The trick to success in med school is not picking the best curriculum, it's being able to adapt to whatever curriculum is in front of you.
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