Principles of psychomotor skills courses

Surgical education has not shown much progress in the past few hundred years. We have more to teach, and we have formalized and fancied the process, but it essentially remains the same--the preceptor model in the clinical setting during formal education and passive learning without feedback after that. Few would question, therefore, that new and innovative techniques in surgical teaching need to be explored. Psychomotor skills teaching is one method. It is important that both teacher and student realize that it is being evaluated and will change. Perhaps it, like much of continuing medical education, will give way to cost control. Or it may become a standard in postgraduate education. Whatever happens, a careful consideration of its fundamentals leads me to believe that psychomotor skills teaching may be the best thing that has happened to surgical education in this century.