Report Broken Links Here

9th Annual Meeting 
of the 
International Association of Medical Science Educators 

July 14-19, 2005
 

Abstract Category: General

Poster ID: G3

PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE, WHAT ABOUT IT?

Carlos E. de la Garza-González Dr. med.,¹* Luis Antonio Rodríguez Robles¹, Nancy Esthela Fernández Garza Dr. med².,Norberto López-Serna Dr. med¹.,Ma. Esthela Morales Pérez, Dr. med¹. 1 Departamento de Embriología, 2 Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 64460 Monterrey, N.L., MÉXICO.

In the Teaching and Learning process the teachers assume that the student’s previous knowledge fills our expectations of it, and in a new course we start building the new knowledge on the basis of the previous one. But for a large or small group of our students is that correct?

Using a twenty question test, we explore the previous basic knowledge of Embryology of two groups of students. Group 1 (n= 35) made up by first semester students and Group 2 (n= 33) made up of second semester students in a School of Medicine with a traditional curriculum. The test was applied on the first day of the course. Off the twenty questions, fifteen deal with knowledge, that in our opinion the students must know, and the other five with knowledge directly related to embryology. We asked the students according to their own opinion to answer each question with “A” if they consider they know the answer, with “B” if they think they know the answer, and “C” if they don’t know the answer at all. In addition they should write a short answer for each question marked with A or B. The tests were evaluated and three categories of answers were taken into consideration: AG > SG, AG = SG and AG < SG, where SG means Self Grade and AG Assigned Grade.

Slightly more than half of the questions that the students rated with “A” don’t correlate with the assigned grade (AG < SG). The situation gets worse when we analyze the questions with the “B” answer, where we find that for nearly all the questions, students in our classroom had the wrong idea for that knowledge. Those results in this case, should drive us to think and reflect: What mechanisms should be used to drive the students to the right knowledge? And perhaps more difficult, How can we achieve that students change the wrong knowledge, that they think is correct, for the right one?

© 1997-2004 IAMSE  Privacy Statement