Improving the teaching skills of residents as tutors/facilitators and addressing the shortage of faculty facilitators for PBL modules

This quasi experimental descriptive comparative research involved 5 postgraduate year 4 residents and five senior faculty members. The study was conducted with all phase III (Final year) students rotating in Gastroenterology. The residents and faculty members received brief training of one month in facilitation and core principles of adult education. Different aspects of teaching skills of residents and faculty were evaluated by students on a questionnaire (graded on Likert Scale from 1 to 10) assessing i) Knowledge Base-content Learning (KBL), ii) PBL, iii) Student Centered Learning (SCL) and iv) Group Skills (GS).There were 33 PBL teaching sessions in which 120 evaluation forms were filled; out of these 53% forms were filled for residents and 47% for faculty group. The faculty showed a statistically greater rating in "KBL" (faculty 8.37 Vs resident 7.94; p-value 0.02), "GS" (faculty 8.06 vs. residents 7.68; p-value 0.04). Differences in faculty and resident scores in "the PBL" and "SCL" were not significant. The overall score of faculty facilitators, however, was statistically significant for resident facilitators. (p = .05).1) Residents are an effective supplement to faculty members for PBL; 2) Additional facilitators for PBL sessions can be identified in an institution by involvement of residents in teacher training workshops.There are different ways of learning in the medical school including didactic lectures, class room discussions, small group discussion or tutorials. One of the new learning process is "Problem Based Learning" (PBL). This is an active learning strategy that enables the students to develop critical thinking skills through posing challenges based on clinical case scenarios. PBL also helps students to activate their knowledge and elaborate on hypothesis after critically analyzing it and then resolving problems using all available literature [1]. PBL modules are conducted in our medical school by the faculty members. This is increasingly difficu