MedEdPublish (Jun 2018)
How do the first year students find the way of learning medicine in Japan?
Abstract
Background: There are students who drop out medical school during the early years. Objectives: We investigated how the first year students find the way of learning medicine. Material and methods: We developed a freshman orientation program that combined PBL and simulation learning with SPs. We collected freshman's impressions in 2013 and 2014 from their freely written comments after the course and then qualitatively analyzed their responses. Results: Five main categories were labeled anxiety, knowledge, reconstructing visions, expanding community and readiness. The story lines generated from this result is as follows. The students were obsessed with the large volume of knowledge they needed to acquire. They began to reconstruct their future visions. Many recognized the necessity to expand their range of relationships through learning with peers and SPs. They also began to transfer this learning activity to diverse social experiences. These experiences were useful for building readiness to learn. Conclusion: Freshmen, who are neither laypersons nor medical professionals, could lead to establishing a readiness to start a medical career through expanding their community. This can be experienced only at this stage of their learning. It is a good time for an intervention to modify behavior to improve the learning of medicine.
