Abstract
Based on the theory of teaching as assistedperformance (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988), the UtrechtUniversity Law School has implemented college teachingfocusing on a particular combination of various methods of assisting students' performance. In additionto the conventional case method in legal education, theproblem method was adopted as the primary method ofinstruction. This method focused on how students learn to solve legal problems by actuallyfinding, framing, and analyzing issues themselves.Contingency management was used to motivate students tocomplete problem-solving assignments and attend theseminars in which training was provided for legalproblem-solving skills. Analyses of variance wereperformed to examine the relation between the problemand the case method, and students' time-on-task andachievement. The results were favorable to the problemmethod: Compared to the case method, students spent moretime on learning activities and performed better,controlling for the analysis for their previousachievement, time-on-task in previous terms, and motivationfor the particular course. The differences inachievement between both teaching methods were mainlyrelated to the difference in the time students spent on the particular course.
Highlights
Good conceptual knowledge is an essential requirement for health professions students, in that they are required to apply concepts learned in the classroom to a variety of different contexts
Good conceptual knowledge enables more flexible problem solving because those who understand the rationale behind procedures are more likely to reason their way Joseph et al BMC Medical Education (2017) 17:90 through novel cases, taking into account the unique profile of each case [4, 5]
We introduced the use of Concept mapping (CM)’s as a teaching and evaluation tool to determine if we could detect changes in students’ conceptual knowledge after structured, formative feedback
Summary
Good conceptual knowledge is an essential requirement for health professions students, in that they are required to apply concepts learned in the classroom to a variety of different contexts. The purpose of this study was to use Kinchin’s criteria to assess the impact of structured feedback on the graphical complexity of CM’s by observing the development of richer knowledge frameworks. Health professions education has traditionally emphasized the development of procedural knowledge whereby students learn how to perform diagnostic and curative techniques [2]. By providing a visual representation of the relationship between concepts, CMs help students organize and structure their thoughts. This in turn allows educators to detect gaps and misconceptions in students’ understanding [9], which can be addressed with feedback
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