Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Learning to cure, but learning to care?

Learning to cure, but learning to care? Utilizing interviews with students and a key administrator, analyses of academic schedules, and observations of courses, labs, and small groups, this study examines if and how elements of the explicit preclinical curriculum may have deleterious effects on medical students’ humanitarian attributes, namely empathy. Findings from this case-study of a medical school in the United States suggest that the lack of frequent formal testing in the psycho-social aspects of patient care during the preclinical years, as well as a general reduction in curriculum hours devoted to teaching the social aspects of medicine, may serve as mechanisms behind the diminution of medical students’ levels of empathy and other positive attributes as found by previous research. Following the basic tenets of the Testing Effect and the assumption that assessment drives learning, it is argued that a feasible way to maintain and potentially cultivate these traits among medical students, without saturating an overwhelmed medical curriculum, would be to install periodic, formally graded exams into preclinical curriculums that evaluate empathy and the psycho-social aspects of care. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Advances in Health Sciences Education Springer Journals

Learning to cure, but learning to care?

Michalec, Barret
Advances in Health Sciences Education , Volume 16 (1) – Sep 25, 2010
Download PDF
22 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/learning-to-cure-but-learning-to-care-GhFjhA0QOV

References (59)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Subject
Education; Medical Education
ISSN
1382-4996
eISSN
1573-1677
DOI
10.1007/s10459-010-9249-0
pmid
20872070
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Utilizing interviews with students and a key administrator, analyses of academic schedules, and observations of courses, labs, and small groups, this study examines if and how elements of the explicit preclinical curriculum may have deleterious effects on medical students’ humanitarian attributes, namely empathy. Findings from this case-study of a medical school in the United States suggest that the lack of frequent formal testing in the psycho-social aspects of patient care during the preclinical years, as well as a general reduction in curriculum hours devoted to teaching the social aspects of medicine, may serve as mechanisms behind the diminution of medical students’ levels of empathy and other positive attributes as found by previous research. Following the basic tenets of the Testing Effect and the assumption that assessment drives learning, it is argued that a feasible way to maintain and potentially cultivate these traits among medical students, without saturating an overwhelmed medical curriculum, would be to install periodic, formally graded exams into preclinical curriculums that evaluate empathy and the psycho-social aspects of care.

Journal

Advances in Health Sciences Education – Springer Journals

Published: Sep 25, 2010

There are no references for this article.