A Symposium-Based Self-Directed Learning Approach to Teaching Medical Cell Biology to Medical Students

Abstract

The Commonwealth Medical College has used a variety of self-directed learning pedagogies to promote the student’s performance and knowledge retention since its inception in 2009. Based on this goal, a Cell Biology Symposium was designed to allow students to present medical cell biology concepts to their peers. It was believed that by utilizing a team-based learning strategy, this would enhance the students’ learning. This is a study that describes how well medical students mastered medical cell biology concepts in a classroom lecture-based format versus a peer-teaching format arranged as a Medical Cell Biology Symposium. We analyzed the list of cell biology concepts that medical students were required to understand according to guidelines published by the 2009 US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 Content Description and General Information (2008) and chose eight appropriate subjects and associated diseases that would cover these concepts. The 65 students in the 2009 class were assigned to teams and given faculty selected papers. Their goal was a PowerPoint presentation to their fellow students, designed on updating the class on the changes in medical knowledge since their assigned paper was published, including associated learning objectives and an annotated bibliography. We analyzed a student-derived, take-home test and a multiple-choice test given to the subsequent class of 2010, also composed of 65 students. As expected, scores for the open-book take-home test were much higher than the scores in a closed-book, multiple-choice examination given in the subsequent year. Our data indicate that satisfaction with an activity does not necessarily correlate with knowledge of this subject area in test performance and that this type of self-directed learning activity is an excellent way to deliver cell biology content to medical students. The real value of the Cell Biology Symposium may lie more in improving student skills in communication, problem solving, leadership, and working together as a team. These skills will be at least as important to the future success of our medical students as their mastery of the basic science, in this case cell biology, associated with the practice of medicine.