Educational Methods to Acquire an Ability of Problem Solving : PBL Tutorial and TBL(Team-Based Learning)(Professionalism in Psychosomatic Medicine)

Abstract

Because patients come to doctors with "problems" not "diseases", we should have an ability of problem solving to carry out medical practices. However, most of medical students cannot master the ability from usual didactic teaching. So in the field of medical education, a current "From sage on the stage to guide on the side" has been spreading. One of the methods is PBL tutorial. In PBL, the students are introduced to think and discuss about a medical problem (s) (complaints and/or symptoms) in a small number of groups by the guidance of a tutor. The merit of PBL is expected to improve the students' ability of thinking. On the other hand, it has some faults. One is necessity of a grate number of tutors, and the second is that one PBL session cannot cover wide areas of medicine for its spending time. In contrast, TBL (Team-Based Learning) needs only one teacher in one TBL session and can teach more contents than PBL. One TBL session consists of three phases, preparation for the lesson, readiness assurance process, and application. In the second phase, IRAT (individual readiness assurance test) and GRAT (group readiness assurance test) are performed. Group discussion should be made for GRAT and an applied question (phase three). A peer review for each student's accountability for the group is done at the end of the session and the evaluation is expected to promote a student's motivation for studying. In order to introduce PBL or TBL to psychosomatic medical education, materials are desirable to be prepared by societies of psychosomatic medicine and psychosomatic internal medicine.