Re: the calculus wars

Timothy Koschmann (tkoschmann who-is-at acm.org)
Thu, 17 Jun 1999 13:01:30 -0500

Well, I'm finally back in the office after a couple weeks of traveling and
I see (thanks to the gremlin) that I am now re-connected to the list. I
guess, like Dorthy, all I really had to do was click my heels together
three times . . .

I wrote (sometime back):
>> By the pre-requisites do you mean pre-matrication requirements such as
>> organic chemistry, etc. that all students are expected to take in their
>> pre-med program? There are no pre-requisites to the PBL track in medical
>> school. Students are expected to pick up necessary basic science in the
>> context of collaboratively working with problems.

Nate replied:
>I guess a part of me finds it hard to believe. I would question what the
>role the "track" has to do with the lack of prerequisites. Often certain
>sub-programs (tracts) are successful specifically because it is sheltered
>from socio-historical contraints. Education has *teach for america* and
>other such programs that are intentionally sheltered from the contraints
>that regular SOE programs have to deal with. Even with such sheltering
>though the outcome tends to be the same. My concern with PBL is not that
>it can't be as or more successful, but that it is.

Which part of it do you find incredible, that the students are able to
organize their own learning, both socially and conceptually, without the
preparatory coursework? They can and have been doing this since we
introduced the alternate track in 1990.

I think there is a certain sheltering here, but I think it is a sheltering
of the curriculum itself rather than of students within a curriculum.
Because this is being done within the confines of a certain kind of
professional school, it is possible to exert more control over what gets
taught and how it gets taught than would be possible in some other
situation (e.g., an undergraduate department trying to shift to a more
PBL-oriented teaching approach, a graduate program in which the curriculum
is less uniform across students). Medical schools, therefore, have the
luxury of doing something like this that might be difficult or impossible
in some other setting. The curricular innovation is sheltered, therefore,
from the things, e.g., grades, requirements from outside classes,
scheduling constraints, that would otherwise interfer with implementing a
program of this type.
---Tim