On teaching radiology to medical students: Challenges for the nineties

Abstract

In one type of radiology elective still widely offered in the United States, a single student essentially sits at the elbow of the radiologist watching him get his work done. Such a student would be fortunate indeed to be able to have explained to him the clinical correlation of imaging findings in 20 patients during a single day's observation. In contrast, our students get through a total of 2500 proved film cases, not counting those contained in the assigned reading material. Moreover, these students have spent one-half of their time actively participating in a small-group approach to materials programmed for them, but complete the material at their own pace and without the interference of an instructor. We believe that this system results in much more indelible learning and that it is flexible enough to fit different personalities and learning preferences among the students. Most of the students soon appreciate the advantages of group endeavor, in which a rich pool of background reading and clinical experience can be drawn on during the discussion, because each student contributes data no other student possesses. Only a few students are aware at the beginning of the month how much they stand to learn about consultation techniques from this type of group endeavor with their peers. We believe that more small-group learning should be the educational pattern of the future, replacing to a major extent the classic techniques of learning from lectures and books and passive observation. At the moment we use no small-group computer-assisted instruction in radiology, but with the new video techniques available we see an important place for such instruction in the future. Whereas computer-assisted learning in the past has largely involved one student to one machine, we confidently expect that computer-assisted small-group participation will be an exciting new mode of learning radiology as we enter the 21st century. The development of these techniques will certainly depend on the evolution of a reward system for teaching and the time spent in the preparation of such learning materials.