Barriers to the acceptance of problem-based learning in medical schools

ABSTRACT Despite a steadily increasing recognition that most medical schools in both Britain and the USA now provide inappropriate educational methods for the future needs of their students, there has been little interest or activity in curricular development in most established schools. Most of the problems identified with medical education are neither new nor unique to medicine, and resemble those found in many post-graduate professional schools where academic educational and professional training roles conflict. Included among these mutual problems are curricular overload due to a steady increase in basic scientific knowledge, overemphasis on factual memorisation and recall at the expense of scientific reasoning skills and knowledge utilisation, and a failure to secure integration of basic scientific concepts into clinical practice. A promising solution to many of these criticisms has recently emerged in the form of problem-based learning. This method, designed to encourage learning in a functional con...