MedEdPORTAL (Sep 2015)
Mood Disorders Team-Based Learning Exercise
Abstract
Abstract Introduction This exercise is used in a second-year medical course titled “The Mind.” The purpose of this 3-week long course is to provide an introduction to psychiatric illnesses, including diagnoses, neuroscience correlates, and basic treatments for psychiatric illnesses, including psychopharmacology. The authors of this exercise have extensive experience developing and facilitating TBL modules. This TBL session focuses on case vignettes with the following subject matter: a bipolar woman on an inpatient psychiatric ward who is actively manic and a young woman, also on an inpatient psychiatric ward, who has been hospitalized for major depression. Methods Learning involves preclass reading by students and lectures by faculty, as well as application exercises that include case analysis and discussion of clinical scenarios. Assessment of student learning includes an in-class quiz and class discussion. Materials include citations for the preclass readings, a facilitator description of the cases, a readiness assurance test, application exercise, and the videos of the simulated patients. This session works well with up to about 100 students organized in groups of about six to seven students. Results Course evaluation data for the TBL sessions on mood disorders for the last 4 years have averaged 4.31 (with 5 being the highest). The overall topics on mood and bipolar disorders rated 4.44, which shows how confident the students felt in their ability to master the objectives for these topics. Discussion This module is one of three TBL modules conducted during The Mind course. This TBL module on depression and bipolar disorder (including treatments) is intended for second year medical students learning about psychopathology and psychopharmacology. Other TBL modules in this course discuss topics of dementia and substance use disorders.
Keywords
