Integration of basic sciences in health's courses

Abstract

Concepts from disciplines such as Biochemistry, Genetics, Cellular and Molecular Biology are essential to the understanding and treatment of an elevated number of illnesses, but often they are studied separately, with no integration between them. This article proposes a model for basic sciences integration based on problem‐based learning (PBL) and compares failure rate, global final grade, approved student final grade, grade distribution and students' satisfaction with teacher conduction between integrated curriculum and traditional learning in health courses from Anhembi Morumbi University—a private institution from Brazil. Comparison between integrated and traditional curriculum was based on students' records obtained from first‐year health sciences students. A total of 1,697 records from 2005 to 2007 (nonintegrated curriculum) and 785 records from 2008 (integrated curriculum) were selected for this study and they were necessary to get information about students' grades. Moreover, a questionnaire was applied in order to cover student's satisfaction with teacher conduction. The data presented in this study indicated that the integrated curriculum based on PBL was related to an improvement in student's grades and satisfaction compared with traditional teaching. We believe that the effectiveness in health education will be a combination of “classical” presentation of contents associated to actively involved students in the educational process and methodology based on problems in order to create the stimulus for the undergraduates continue to integrate basic and clinical investigation.

A Collaborative Project to Bridging the Gap between Basic and Clinical Teachers: The Opinion of Medical Students

“…Nevertheless, sometimes it may be arduous to allow the fact that the increasing knowledge of biological sciences may be incorporated into clinical sciences [3]. In this way of thinking several experiences have recently been described [4][5][6]. In 2 Journal of Biomedical Education of students concerning the utility of basic sciences for their future clinical practice.…”

A systematic review to investigate student performance and their learning experiences within integrated healthcare curricula

“…These 40 studies reported integrated educational interventions employed across medicine (n=28) [10-12, 16-21, 23-25, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38-41, 44-49], pharmacy (n=11) [13-15, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 42],and dentistry (n=1) [22] in institutions worldwide: United States of America (n=14) [11, 13-15, 24-27, 29, 30, 32, 40, 42, 46], India (n=7) [10, 18-20, 28, 33, 41], United Kingdom (n=6) [22,35,37,39,43], Middle East (n=4) [16,17,23,31], the Netherlands (n=4) [31,44,48,49], Belgium (n=2) [45,47], and one from each of: Stockholm [12], Brazil [21], Germany [36], and Korea [38].…”

“…The number of students experiencing the integrated educational activities was not always described, but where included, cohorts varied from relatively small, approximately 30-40, to very large, approximately 1000-2000 students. Most studies, (n=34) adopted surveys to capture student feedback [10,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][34][35][36][37][38][39][43][44][45][46][47][48][49], six studies employed student interviews or focus groups [11,12,27,29,36,37] and 24 assessed student performance at a terminal assessment [10,14,15,17,18,21,[23]…”

“…Where this was included, the goals most prominently related to the design of a student learning environment to improve active and self-directed learning [10,13,16,[18][19][20]46]. There was some focus on the desire to increase student knowledge development, specifically to improve knowledge integration across different disciplines [11,12,14,21,25,28,29,32,35,36,37,39,42,44], and to augment student skills development [10,16,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]32,46] e.g. critical thinking, problem-solving, and clinical reasoning.…”

“…critical thinking, problem-solving, and clinical reasoning. Half of the studies (n=20) described activities at the interdisciplinary level of integration [12,13,[15][16][17][18]20,21,[23][24][25][27][28][29]31,35,37,[44][45][46] and eight described elements of, or a full curriculum, at the transdisciplinary level [10,11,22,[39][40][41]43,49]. Two studies described interventions at the correlation [26,32], and at the multidisciplinary levels [14,31], and one at the complementary level [42].…”