Personal Viewpoint: On the Scientific Method and Clinical Reasoning in the PBL Curriculum

Authors

Damon Sakai
Bong-Hyun Chang
Chiu-Yin Kwan
Leslie Tam

Abstract

The World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) curricular standard #2 is that medical schools must throughout the curriculum teach the scientific method. In problem-based learning (PBL) Howard Barrows has written that hypothetico-deduction is the scientific method of clinicians. We discuss how the scientific method can be used daily in PBL. The Group of Related Diseases Display (GRDD), as an educational scaffold used by some PBL students, is introduced. The GRDD facilitates the forward clinical reasoning exercise (CRE) in which the tutor plays a simulated patient, and the reverse CRE, in which students write a new case and simulate the patient. In a pilot study, students from Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea had high regard for reverse-CRE. PBL may be ready for the next developmental stage, in which Bloom's higher levels of educational goals - that of knowledge application (forward CRE) and knowledge synthesis (reverse CRE) are explored.

First Page

228

Last Page

236

DOI

10.6145/jme201623

Recommended Citation

Sakai, Damon; Chang, Bong-Hyun; Kwan, Chiu-Yin; and Tam, Leslie (2016) "Personal Viewpoint: On the Scientific Method and Clinical Reasoning in the PBL Curriculum," Journal of Medical Education: Vol. 20: Iss. 3, Article 14.
DOI: [https://doi.org/]10.6145/jme201623
Available at: https://jme.researchcommons.org/journal/vol20/iss3/14