Modern Educational Methods and Their Relation to Medical Education

Aknowledge of the main features of the teaching methods which are being subjected to experiment in schools of the present day may be of assistance to those interested in the problem of teaching medical students. The method of allowing children of kindergarten age to educate themselves by placing before them facilities from which they acquire ideas and facts of various kinds was introduced first in Italy by Mme. Montessori. The teacher occupies a purely secondary place, answers questions and acts as an assistant and guide to the child instead of a dictator and instructor…. The chief feature of the method consists of centering the attention of the child and keeping the teacher in the secondary position. … In order to stimulate the interest of pupils in their studies, Mr. H. Caldwell Cook has introduced a method known as “The Play Way.” He endeavors to get the pupils to take an active part in learning by encouraging them to carry on debates, give little lectures and write topical verses. The chief concern is the development of an attitude toward their lessons similar to that toward their games. The work is not treated as frivolously, but with due seriousness. So long as the pupils get enjoyment out of their work, no difficulty is met in getting them to concentrate upon it. The operation of the underlying principle of this method is seen in medical education in the change of attitude of many students when they begin seeing and diagnosing actual cases in the hospital, after leaving the practical studies in the laboratory and dissecting room. The introduction of clinical teaching in the earlier years of the course is based to a certain extent on this principle. The general recognition of the purposive element is another of the modern tendencies in school method. The view that pupils should know why they learn this or that in school has been very widely accepted. The problems met with have to do with real life instead of some vague hypothetical situation. Out of this idea, there has developed what is called the “Project Method.” The basis of this scheme consists in providing for the students the development of some problem from actual life and in enabling them to evolve the underlying principles. Instead of studying individual subjects, learning their principles and being left to apply and correlate them at some later stage in life, the pupils are brought in contact with some actual experience in the expectation that they will see the relations and applications and draw therefrom conclusions as to the principles involved. Instead of systematically covering physics, chemistry and biology in a science course in high school, instruction is given in such projects as “Inventions—wind mill; water mill; their uses; the lift pump; levers; pulleys; simple machines” in physics; or “iron smelting of ores; cast iron and steel” in chemistry or “pond life in the fall; turtle; frog; the pond as a life society or life group” in biology. … On the one hand, the endeavor is to make the student acquire a systematic and organized knowledge of each particular subject by leading him logically from the elements of each to a complete conception of them all; but leaving their integration, correlation and application to the chance experience of each individual student. On the other hand, there are those who consider it more important to attain an intelligent organized grasp of the whole with a realization of the relations and applications of its component parts. For the latter, the Project Method holds out many advantages over the older more formal type. The solution probably lies between the two extremes. The tendency in the past has been unquestionably to pay too much attention to individual subjects and too little to the organized knowledge of the whole. Such a state exists in medical education, in which individual subjects are taught to a large extent independently of one another and with no purposive effort to produce a well-balanced co-ordinated, organized, practical conception of the whole field of medical science. The introduction of the study of certain large subjects along the lines of the Project Method would assist in attaining this result.

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