Abstract:

The teaching-learning process on the European Space for Higher Education requires the active participation of the students. On the same way, the European Union Advisory Committe on medical training stablished that medical students should be the center of their teaching-learning process. In the medical training process, the students must acquire a set of specific skills related with the medical knowledge and the capability to develop several competences related to the medical practice. However, in medical education and health sciences the transversal competences are fundamental as in many profesions. The generic competences are common in most of the profesions and are deeply correlated with actitudes, personality, adquired knowledges and personal principles. According to this, in medical and health sciences education it is really important that the students learn how to present and defend their scientific results in the context of a scientif congress.

For this reason, to acquire skills to present oral scientific communications should be added to the development of discussion and scientific dissertation habilities. The main objective of this study was to develop a didactic strategy that stimulates the acquisition of scientific related competences no explicitly available in the current medical curricula. For this propose, two electives subjects of the medical curriculum of the University of Granada, Tissue Engineering and Dental Histology were selected. First, diagnostic test was used to analyze the previous knowledge of the students on these subjects. Then, students were trained on the different ways to present scientific results and the contents that a poster should have. During the academic year thematic units were selected by the students for future congress simulation activity at the end of the subject. Finally, a diagnostic test was applied to analyze the results of this model.

Our results showed that most of the students would prefer to use oral presentations to communicate their scientific results, followed by poster presentation, scientific manuscripts and internet submission. Regarding poster presentation the students considered at the begining of the academic year that results and pictures are the most important part of the poster whereas methods and discussion where the less important sections, with differences being statistically significant for men vs women for the discussion section (p= 0.004). This results suggest that transversal competences should be included in the contents of oficial subjects of the medical curriculum and congress simulation is a good tool for the adquisition of relevant scientific competences.