“Memory clinics:” A complement to teaching and learning in pharmacology

Abstract

Pharmacology is considered one of the most difficult subjects by medical students. One of the reasons that explains the difficulty is the need to learn multiple names of medications that are not familiar to the medical student. To support the learning of pharmacology, we have developed "memory clinics" to offer a metacognitive space that allows the student to reflect on their study methods and fears when learning pharmacology."Memory clinics" are a voluntary activity in which medical pharmacology students can participate. The activity takes place in several stages during a one‐hour block. 1) Two short study sessions (individually, individually or in groups) to memorize biomedical information related to pharmacology. 2) retention of information is evaluated in a short activity in which the students solve a crossword puzzle. At the beginning, in‐between the sub‐stages and at the end of the activity the students answer some open questions in which they reflect about confidence in their mastery of the concepts and time devoted to study and answer questions. At the end of the activity, the correct answers to the questions are given and each student evaluates his/her own performance.The piloting of innovation shows that students are very pleased with the activity and recognize the importance of having a space to reflect on their learning processes. At the beginning, only three "memory clinics" were planned, but students have requested that more activities of this type be included, because they feel that innovation has favored their learning process.Support or Funding InformationCollege of Medicine, Universidad de los AndesThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.