Does student experiential background influence perception of and performance in a cross-disciplinary, ‘clustered’ problem based learning exercise?

Martyn Kingsbury1, Joanne Lymn2
1Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, 2University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

Pharmacology impacts on a broad spectrum of basic and clinical sciences in medicine and is well suited to the student-centred teaching approach offered by PBL; it is effectively used in a number of institutions (Kaufman and Mann, 1999) and accepted as promoting the integration of knowledge across conventional boundaries in a professionally relevant context (Maudsley and Scrivens, 2000).

In light of this we used a clustered PBL methodology (Kingsbury and Lymn, 2003), to stimulate interest in, and encourage integration of, pharmacological information in both undergraduate medical students (MSs) and non-medical practitioners (NMPs) on a prescribing course at a separate institution.

The aim of this study was to define the two groups and investigate whether student perception of PBL is influenced by experiential background and relate this to the success of process. MSs and NMPs were sampled using a validated questionnaire, given after the third PBL session; data was transcribed and analysed using SPSS. Experimental design and analysis was performed following the British Educational Research Association’s code of ethics. Approximately 60% of MSs and 83% of NMPs completed the questionnaires.

Data shows the two populations (MSs n=157; NMPs n=83) differed significantly in terms of age, gender split and relative educational and clinical experience. Despite these fundamental differences the attitude of both student groups to the PBL experience was very similar with 81% of the NMPs and 79% of the MSs expressing the view that ‘this was a good way of learning’. Students from both groups also made comments that suggested that they were able to contextualise the information they gained in such a way that they could appreciate the relevance of the information and the scenarios used as it applied to their own circumstances;

‘Clinical topics made it easier to understand relevance of info taught.’ MS

‘Being able to explore/study in depth a drug of choice relevant to my own area of practice and gained greater knowledge and understanding’ NMP

Overall we feel that this methodology was successful in both groups and that despite the difference in clinical and educational experiential background, both were able to successfully utilise the challenging clinical case based problems to integrate and contextualise their pharmacological knowledge.

Kaufman DM, Mann KV. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 1999,4:245-260.
Kingsbury MP & Lymn JS. Br. J. Pharmacol. 2003;140,33
Maudsley G, Scrivens J: Med Educ 2000,34:535-544