Helping medical students to learn pathology more effectively

Teaching methods in pathology for undergraduate medical students are not effective.

To document measures that can be adopted by individual teachers that can excite the interest, participation of the students and help them learn pathology in a clinical reasoning context.

Medical students in a large international medical school with class sizes of 700-900 were taught the pathology course in a period of sixteen weeks for two cohorts of students each year over a period of twenty years.

Specific learning objectives were devised to achieve higher levels of cognitive domain including interpretation, analysis and problem solving of clinical data of patients related to the objectives. The teaching sessions were modified to provide for maximum active participation by students with effective feedback at multiple points. Additional learning tools like concept maps, clickers, modified essay questions, flipped classrooms, clinicopathological conferences, directed self-learning activities were included. Learning objectives and assessment tools for professional behavior and communication skills were included.

The students actively participated in all the learning activities with enthusiasm and achieved the objectives as reflected in the performance in the in-house examinations and the USMLE step one examination which tests clinical vignette-based problem-solving principles of which around 70% are related to pathology.

The teaching sessions in pathology were useful and effective with adaptation to interactive, clinical reasoning platforms for teaching and assessment.