Illinois Medicine

direct lecture transmission of information, without enough of the instruction giving students opportunities to engage with the material," says Abbas Hyderi, MD '01, MPH, associate dean for curriculum. He notes that cognitive psychology studies over the past 15 years have shown that retention increases the more teaching moves from lecture to interactive learning that includes problem solving and empowering students to teach material to each other. For her success, Carr particularly credits Pradip Raychaudhuri, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics, her doctoral advisor and head of the lab where she conducted her studies. "He really put in the time mentoring me. He had a personal interest," she says. In addition, while most of the lab's work concentrated on the liver, Raychaudhuri Students participate in case-based active learning during their first and second years. allowed Carr to pursue her own interest in its role in breast cancer, which emerged after she read a paper that found cancer patients with high levels of FoxM1 had poor survival rates. A northern California native, Carr now is an internal medicine resident in the University of California San Francisco Medical Center's Molecular Medicine program, which facilitates the development of physician-scientists. After her residency, she'll undertake a fellowship in medical oncology that will include three years devoted mostly to research. Her ultimate goal is to become a faculty member at an academic medical center, dividing her time between patient care and related research. She's found many role models for her future role at the College of Medicine. "There are some amazing faculty at U. of I. who not only take an interest in teaching you, but in how you learn, how to approach a problem," she says. They'll take the time to give a lunchtime lecture, or go through a complete physical during rounds. They stay late and go out of their way to do those things. It's a dedication to teaching." is presented with a case and asked a multiple-choice question about it; for example, how to treat a 30-year-old man requesting alcohol detoxification given his history, lab results, symptoms, physical exam findings and liver biopsy. The teams answer the question at the same time by raising cards that are color-coded to match the answer options, allowing Lin and her fellow instructors to see how well the class understood the case. "They have to work as a team to look at a clinical scenario, put the pieces together and come up with an answer. All the answers have a degree of correctness, and they're challenged to pick the best one," Lin says. "The students aren't just learning content, they're learning skills that are important in the future, like working in teams, communication and professionalism." Team-based learning has been added to other courses, including biochemistry, genetics, immunology, clinical pathophysiology, psychiatry and physiology, and the number of team learning sessions will be increased in several courses this academic year. The goal of this shift is to increase students' depth of understanding and retention of the material. "Students have a binge and purge approach to learning. They cram it all in, purge it out on the test, and move on to the next section. We The most recent curricular change to highlight that want them to retain more of what they're learning," Lin says. Michael Huvard, who finished his second year of medidedication was the implementation of team-based learning, cal school this spring, feels the immediate reinforcement of the which started in the 2011-2012 academic year in the secondteam learning sessions helps ensure students understand the year General and Systemic Pathology course. Five times a year, lectures in the course are replaced by material correctly. "If the students don't understand, the profes- Team-based Learning: Discovering Solutions to Complex Problems 12 | FA LL 2 013 sessions in which the class of nearly 200 students is divided into teams of five to seven. Each individual student is given a 10-question quiz based on homework assignments related to the day's topic. The team then re-takes the quiz as a group, using a scratch-off card to answer each of the multiple-choice questions until they get it right. "The idea is that the students in the team each have particular strengths, and they complement and balance each other out. One student knows something they can impart to the others, so they teach each other," explains Amy Lin, MD, director of curricular affairs, director of the pathology course and assistant professor of pathology and opthalmology. After the quizzes, there's a discussion period to go over questions that gave students trouble. Then the entire class

• Cover