(2001). Teaching in the medical setting: balancing teaching styles, learning styles and teaching methods. Medical Teacher: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 610-612.

Teaching in the medical setting: balancing teaching styles, learning styles and teaching methods

The Confederation of Postgraduate Medical Education Councils launched the Australian Curriculum Framework for Junior Doctors in October 2006. The curriculum framework: balances the major areas of clinical management, communication and professionalism, and highlights the importance of an integrated approach to prevocational learning and teaching; supports practice-based, opportunistic and continuous learning, and specifies performance and supervision requirements for junior doctors; and has been published in both Internet and printable versions, to make the document accessible and easily usable by junior doctors and supervisors. The implementation of the curriculum framework will be overseen by a steering group that includes representatives from key stakeholder groups, including junior doctors and medical students.

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Australian Curriculum Framework for Junior Doctors.

Concept maps have been used in nursing education as a method for students to organize and analyze data. This article describes an online course that used concept maps and self-reflective journals to assess students' thinking processes. The self-reflective journals of 21 students collected over two semesters were qualitatively examined. Three major themes emerged from students' use of concept maps: 1) factors influencing the map creation, 2) developmental learning process over time, and 3) validation of existing knowledge and construction of new knowledge. The use of concept maps with reflective journaling provided a learning experience that allowed students to integrate content consistent with a constructivist paradigm. This integration is a developmental process influenced by the personal preferences of students, concept map design, and content complexity. This developmental process provides early evidence that the application of concept mapping in the online environment, along with reflective j...

Using a constructivist approach with online concept maps: relationship between theory and nursing education.

Concept mapping has many applications and has been used as an effective teaching strategy in nursing and other disciplines to evaluate both content knowledge and student thinking patterns. Previous applications related to nursing care planning usually organize client information around a medical diagnosis. The approach described is focused around the reason for nursing care and a holistic nursing view of the client, rather than a disease model. Students use a software program to cluster and sort assessment data to identify client problems and describe relationships between the problems. This results in a nonlinear "picture" of the client that can be used for nursing care planning. The process is dynamic and flexible, prompting students to identify gaps in information, consider salience, and understand the complexity of the particular client situation. It teaches critical thinking skills and nursing theory, develops competence with technology, and fosters effective interchange between faculty and students.

Concept mapping: a nursing model for care planning.

Knowledge is getting increasingly more complex. Learners, from Kindergarten to higher education, require powerful tools to connect complex ideas. This paper explores the range of studies that investigated concept maps as learning, metacognitive, collaborative, and assessment tools to support integrating complex ideas. Research suggests that concept maps can be successfully implemented in a wide variety of settings, from K12 to higher and professional education. However, the effectiveness of concept maps depends on different factors, such as concept map training and choosing a suitable form of concept map to match the task and learner. Developing proficiency in concept mapping takes time and practice and should not be first introduced in higher education. Concept map training could start as early as Kindergarten and include concept map generation, interpretation, and revision. This paper concludes that, if implemented thoughtfully, concept maps can be versatile tools to support knowledge integration processes towards a deeper understanding of the relations and structures of complex ideas and facilitate life-long learning.

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Concept maps as versatile tools to integrate complex ideas: From kindergarten to higher and professional education

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the development of collaborative curricula among colleges and universities, a concept map or visual representation may save thousands of hours of semantic wrangling. Using pictures in curriculum development allows participants with varying backgrounds to share their visions and values, and promotes work at the conceptual level before detailed planning proceeds. A curriculum development team found the use of concept mapping and visual representations to be one of their most valuable means of developing consensus among three faculty groups and practicing nurses. The authors examine concept mapping as a heuristic tool for curriculum development in the context of creating a joint collaborative nursing curriculum in two languages among a university and two community colleges. The use of other visual representations to compensate for some of the limitations of concept mapping are also described. Recommendations are made based on the authors' experience with these tools.

J Van Neste-Kenny

Papers

Using concept maps and visual representations for collaborative curriculum development.