Student directed learning in medical neuroscience curricula

Student-directed learning (SDL) holds the promise of endowing medical students with the skills to tackle the growing body of information in medicine and facilitate its integration to solve clinical problems. The concept of SDL is not new, it grew out of a more commonly used and closely related concept: self-directed learning. Barrows characterizes SDL as the development of effective self-directed learning skills.1 Skills of self-assessment and SDL allow the student to become sensitive to personal learning needs and to locate and to use appropriate information resources. These are essential skills for doctors, as medical knowledge moves ever onwards and new problems will have to be understood in the care of patients. The sufficiency of SDL experiences is one of the criteria used in the United States of America (U.S.) by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education for accreditation (LCME). The LCME is the U.S. Department of Educationrecognized accrediting body for programs leading to the M.D. degree in the U.S. One of its directives, ED-5-A, states that ‘self-assessment on learning needs; the independent identification, analysis and synthesis of relevant information; and the appraisal of the credibility of information sources’ is a necessary part of a medical education program.2 This is a lofty goal – allowing students to determine what content is necessary, identifying and learning said content and then conducting some-level of self-appraisal or assessment. Historically, those tasks are a primary function of the medical school itself, accomplished through its wellworn system of using external and internal indicators for what student’s learning needs are, the faculty then synthesizes and vets content, which is then presented to the student in a variety of ways (e.g. lecture), followed by an assessment which is also a traditional role of the faculty. The origins of SDL are rooted in active learning (AL) where students engage in activities to promote higher-levels of learning and critical thinking. SDL values the progression up the Bloom’s taxonomic ladder as seen in AL, but with an increasing level of responsibility by the student to deter mine what and how to get there.3 It is in this light that SDL becomes not only a desired process, but an essential next step on the academic timeline. Traditionally, neuroscience is a subject perceived by physicians and medical students as very important and highly complex; as such, it could greatly benefit from SDL. The implementation of SDL has been hindered by the lack of standardized definitions and methods, lack of incentive to innovate and an overall persistent adherence to traditional methods. A first step in implementing SDL in medical neuroscience is to determine the amount and type of SDL that currently exists in neuroscience courses.