Problem Based Learning Schools?

[Hysteria24]

Problem Based Learning

This system sounds interesting, especially with my learning abilities (love practical examples and group learning). Besides USC, and UCONN, what other schools implement the PBL system?
Anyone have any personal experiences with it?

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[markymark]

as with everything, pbl has good and bad points. some of the good points are being able to tie in all the information you learn and relating it to a specific case (and also critically analyzing why certain symptoms arise in certain diseases), having the learning based on an interactive setting, being able to retan a relatively larger amount of information because it is based on understanding and not memorization, and there seems to be less cutthroat competition.

as for the bad, it can get frustrating at times if you like to be taught what to learn, there will be certain group members who may not get correct information (this can be corrected by using up-to-date texts as well as staying away from dot com websites), and sometimes the cases may stray from the original topic (if the facilitator isn't good or familiar with the case).

that is all i can think of right now. i will add more later.

overall however, i do not think that one system of teaching is better than another. considering how the first two years of dental school are mostly based on basic sciences, it all comes down to who has more time to study for the board exams.

 

[steiner19er]

IU is big into PBL. Overall the vast majority of the students, including me hate it. You probably go more indepth on the topics you cover in PBL, but you cover less topics and less situations. It is good b/c you help out your fellow students, but we just spent 1 week covering tooth agenesis, and we pretty much beat it into the ground Ya, I know tons about tooth agenesis, but the time I spent on that one topic I could have covered a dozen other topics more superficially. Also at IU we have to evaluate each other at the end of each session, tell each other their strong and weak points, and every session is like "joe, you did a good job today, I am glad you brought in the article from JADA....." It gets tedious. Overall its too time consumming, especially since everyone is used to standard lectures, where you just take the notes and spit the stuff back 2 weeks later on the exam. Not to say we don;t have standard lectures, we do, but they overlap. Say we cover diabetes in PBL, on the biochem exam we have essays regarding diabetes (the biochemical aspects of diabetes), so there is 4 to 6 questions on the exam for biochem that you have to had learned in your small group, the teacher might have not even mentioned diabetes.

 

[Regina330]

The University of Pittsburgh started implementing PBL into the curriculum for this year, but they are not completely PBL.

 

[UBTom]

Here at UB, the first 2 years are purely non-PBL.

In contrast, the clinical experience starting in 3rd year here at UB is all PBL. They throw you into the clinic where you are confronted with all the problems in real patients to whom the "ideal treatment" one learns in the non-PBL didactic classes do not apply.

Having just started in clinic, some of my classmates love the clinical experience. On the other hand I feel intimidated, not knowing for sure if the treatment approach I have in mind is the right one. It makes me feel like an idiot sometimes.