The Personal Progress Index, designed to assess students' knowledge at regular intervals, is administered at the McMaster University (Ontario) Faculty of Health Sciences three times annually. Feedback is provided to students, and accumulated student performance is determined for summative evaluation. Results over 4 classes (n=400) show it to be…

A survey of graduates (n=87) of the University of New Mexico's conventional medical program and its parallel problem-based curriculum (n=33) found graduates of the latter much more likely to work in medically underserved areas and publicly funded health care settings, care for nonpaying patients, and identify patient problems and curiosity as…

Discussion of issues in implementation of problem-based curricula in health professions schools lists some obstacles, offers guidelines for planning the implementation process, describes the use of the guidelines in implementation at one medical school, and outlines some essential elements for success, including administrative support, a…

Working together and exchanging ideas is inherent in interactive learning. The focus of interactive learning is on what learners believe is important to learn, the various processes learners use to learn and how learners use learning in other settings and situations. Active learning processes that promote reflection, writing, demonstrations,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of a web-based constructivist learning environment, which was developed based on a course given to students in the Faculty of Creative Multimedia (FCM) on student learning. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, a web-based multimedia-mediated project was developed based on an Internet…

Peer mentoring has been used for many years by the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine to integrate new students into the academic and social culture of the institution. In 2001, an unusual situation arose. A problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum was introduced and the first cohort in this programme was mentored by senior traditional curriculum…

Primary school teachers generally have to teach several subjects. Their training, however, is often fairly short and it is tempting to force-feed them with everything they need to know to teach these subjects. It is more realistic to accept that a short course cannot do everything. Instead, it would be better to equip these students with skills…

There are concerns in the literature that the use of case-based teaching of anatomy could be compromising the depth and scope of anatomy learned by students in a problem-based learning curriculum. Poor selection of clinical cases that are used as vehicles for teaching/learning anatomy may be the root problem because some clinical cases do not…

Problem Based Learning offers many benefits to students' learning, however, the design and implementation of effective problem based learning (PBL) is not trivial. Central to effective implementation of PBL are the problem design and group working of the students. Design of good problems requires that the learning outcomes of the subject are…

Problem based learning is a successful teaching and learning strategy used to engage students in deep rather than surface learning and where the learning is student focused rather than teacher focused (Biggs, 1999; 2003). The strategy is also successful in aligning university courses with the real-life professional work which students are expected…

Purpose: This paper aims to document the development and use of cases for the leadership development of principals in one large education system in Australia. The case initiative was specially targeted at deepening understandings of the department's recently released statement about the principalship, "Leadership Matters". The…

Students' questions play an important role in meaningful learning and scientific inquiry. They are a potential resource for both teaching and learning science. Despite the capacity of students' questions for enhancing learning, much of this potential still remains untapped. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine and review the…

Schools today function in an environment of complicated rules and regulations. Training preservice teachers in educational law is not only necessary; it is important work. Professors and administrators were surveyed on the methods, materials, and strategies that they employed to teach education law to preservice teachers. The predominant teaching…

There is a growing use of immersive virtual environments for educational purposes. However, much of this activity is not yet documented in the public domain, or is descriptive rather than analytical. This paper presents a case study in which university students were tasked with building an interactive learning experience using Second Life as a…

Well-designed problems are crucial for the success of problem-based learning (PBL). Previous discussions about designing problems for PBL have been rather general and inadequate in guiding educators and practitioners to design effective PBL problems. This paper introduces the 3C3R PBL problem design model as a conceptual framework for…