Tomaz Jose Batista Cisne, Mamede Silvia, Filho Joao Macedo Coelho, Roriz Filho Jarbas de S, van der Molen Henk T
Center for Educational Development in Health, School of Public Health of Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.
Educ Health (Abingdon). 2015 Sep-Dec;28(3):187-93. doi: 10.4103/1357-6283.178605.
Problem-based learning (PBL) and distance education (DE) have been combined as educational approaches in higher education. This combination has been called distributed PBL. In health professions education it has been called online PBL (OPBL). However, more research on the effectiveness of OPBL is needed. The present study aims at evaluating the effectiveness of an OPBL curriculum for training family medical doctors in Brazil.
We used a pretest-posttest control group design in this study. Thirty family physician participants were non-randomly assigned to the experimental group and the same number to the control group. Three instruments for collecting data were used: A multiple choice question knowledge test, an Objective Structural Clinical Examination (OSCE) for assessing the ability to apply the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE) and a test based on clinical cases for assessing the ability to make an adequate differential diagnosis of dementia. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and univariate tests were conducted to see if the difference between the two groups was significant. The effect size was measured by Cohen's d.
A total of 50 participants completed the study. The results show significant effects of the course on participants' knowledge and diagnostic skills.
The results may indicate that innovative pedagogical approaches such as PBL can be effective in an online environment in a low-resources context, with the advantages of DE approach.
基于问题的学习（PBL）和远程教育（DE）已被结合起来作为高等教育中的教学方法。这种结合被称为分布式PBL。在卫生专业教育中，它被称为在线PBL（OPBL）。然而，需要对OPBL的有效性进行更多研究。本研究旨在评估巴西一个用于培训家庭医生的OPBL课程的有效性。
本研究采用了前测-后测对照组设计。30名家庭医生参与者被非随机分配到实验组，同样数量的参与者被分配到对照组。使用了三种数据收集工具：一个多项选择题知识测试、一个用于评估应用简易精神状态检查表（MMSE）能力的客观结构化临床考试（OSCE）以及一个基于临床病例的测试，用于评估对痴呆症进行充分鉴别诊断的能力。进行了多变量方差分析（MANOVA）和单变量测试，以查看两组之间的差异是否显著。效应大小通过科恩d值来衡量。
共有50名参与者完成了研究。结果表明该课程对参与者的知识和诊断技能有显著影响。
结果可能表明，诸如PBL等创新教学方法在资源匮乏的环境下的在线环境中可以有效，具有DE方法的优势。
