Abstract:

The Medicine degree at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain), initiated from the academic year 2011-2012, has been revised recently to adapt some strategies and teaching approaches. One of the main conclusions is that it is not working as it was expected, despite the fact the degree is based on a modern approach curriculum design that enhances the systemic point of view in almost all courses. One of the above mentioned strategies is the scientific method roadmap. As we described in a communication presented in the ICERI 2015, an integrated roadmap was designed by a specific committee in order to introduce the scientific method into the three first academic years of the Medicine degree.
The committee decided to focus on the following Basic and Compulsory subjects: Informatics (first semester), Biostatistics (third semester), and Epidemiology (fifth and sixth semesters). The three subjects were ‘deconstructed’ (split up) to its founding pillars and built again according new requirements in order to optimize the roadmap and distribute some topics along the first three academic years. In addition, the committee elaborated the coordination plan to all the college lecturers: almost every lecturer will teach one part in every subject along six semesters.
However, organizing and optimizing the roadmap between three subjects is not enough to guarantee the new strategy success. This academic project needs to include a third dimension to be complete: an integrative approach. Therefore, the next phase is to find how to integrate almost all concepts, methods and techniques of the three subjects in order to coherently teach them. We found that the Project-Based Learning (PBL) strategy is the appropriate approach to reach this goal. Under PBL, we will raise in the second semester specific non-complex study cases for Informatics students, introducing the following subjects: project design, planning and management, basic epidemiology, data and document searching, scientific presentations, and descriptive statistics. In the third semester, the same study cases are extended adding new requirements in advanced statistics and epidemiology methods, critical literature reviewing and data mining. In the Epidemiology subject, students have to complete study cases with other aspects as public health, evidence-based medicine, qualitative research, more advanced epidemiology research, and project resource planning and management. Nevertheless, this approach could “overflow” the three academic years if we try to carry out a study case with a complexity level as a degree thesis in the last eleventh and twelfth semesters.
The aim of this work is to fully describe requirements, methods and techniques, and the time sequence of medicine study cases, as projects that are scaled semester by semester under the Project-Based Learning approach, in order to enhance the scientific method integrative dimension roadmap in the Medicine degree. This strategy has to be based on convinced lecturers who give their consent and offer collaboration for joining this integration project in a future.

Keywords:

Scientific Method Roadmap Integration, Medicine Degree Curriculum, Project-Based Learning.