Abstract:

Health science education increasingly emphasizes the need to integrate disciplinary knowledge, foster clinical reasoning, and support the development of professional identity. However, undergraduate curricula are often structured as independent courses, which can make it difficult for students to connect concepts across subjects and relate theoretical knowledge to professional practice.

To address this challenge, an educational innovation project was implemented in the Faculty of Optics and Optometry of Terrassa (FOOT) aimed at introducing a problem-based learning (PBL) approach across the first three years of the program. The initiative pursues three main objectives:
(1) to contextualize and integrate learning across courses,
(2) to progressively develop clinical reasoning and professional skills, and
(3) to foster the development of students’ professional identity as future opticians-optometrists.

A key element of the project is the design of six longitudinal clinical cases representing patients with different visual health conditions. These cases accompany students throughout the first three years of the program and are revisited at the beginning of each semester through intensive PBL weeks. During the first week of each semester, students work in small groups of 10–12 participants guided by a tutor who facilitates discussion and reflection. The cases progressively increase in complexity, simulating the long-term follow-up of patients and allowing students to revisit and deepen their understanding as they acquire new knowledge and skills across courses.

The design of the cases follows a storytelling approach in which each semester represents a new “episode” in the patients’ stories. Each episode incorporates learning objectives from the courses taught in that semester, enabling meaningful connections between subjects and promoting an integrated understanding of visual health care.

The initiative has been implemented during the first year of the program with a cohort of 68 first-year students. To evaluate the impact of the experience, data were collected through questionnaires exploring students’ perceptions of the learning experience.

The results indicate that the cases help students perceive the relevance of the contents covered in their courses. Among the subjects involved in the first course, Anatomy and Geometrical Optics were perceived by students as the most relevant for understanding the clinical situations presented in the cases. In addition, after the first intensive PBL week, a significant increase in students’ professional identity was observed, with mean scores rising from 3.95 ± 0.61 to 4.20 ± 0.63. Students also reported that working with the cases increased their motivation towards their future professional practice.

This communication presents the design process of the six longitudinal cases, the narrative structure used to articulate learning across semesters, and preliminary results from the first year of implementation regarding students’ perceptions of this PBL-based curriculum integration strategy.

Keywords:

Problem based learning, clinical skills, professional identity, storytelling, optics and optometry.