Table 4 Participants’ responses regarding perceptions of their experiences that related to “Shared repertoire”

The team test prompted professional skills in critical reflection and collaboration

In TBL, students felt the individual test and team test at the beginning of class reinforced key concepts of the topic, increased confidence, and enabled critical reflection. The team test supported opportunities to explore and view knowledge in different ways.

With an emphasis on active learner involvement, where students were tackling problems together, the students’ learning and reflection process was enhanced.

“The good thing about the tests, both doing it individually and as a group, is, I found it a boost of confidence -- because I would actually remember this stuff and then, learning how to back yourself when you’re maybe unsure that you actually know information and presenting it to people and being able to be, like, no, this is right because of this….. that’s a pretty important step I think…. speaking up more…backing yourself”. (student)

“(In the team test) every single person changed an answer, so we had a couple of people who were really, really strong, and they changed their answer because of the group discussion. ….it’s like legitimate cooperation, with an outcome of, I actually learnt something from these people I was collaborating with…like what a miracle”. (student)

Development of clinical reasoning skills

Facilitators felt students were able to seek appropriate information from peers and from the facilitators in order to solve authentic clinical problems.

Students felt clinical reasoning was assisted by provision of clarification from the expert tutors, particularly around the depth and breadth of basic science relevant to a clinical problem.

“The expert advice they get from the facilitators is what they need, which is an advantage over PBL. It is really good to see students work through an authentic clinical problem and seeing them ask the right questions around clinical reasoning or understanding scientific principles and being able to give them the up to date, evidence based answers”. (facilitator)

“I think the other good thing about having the experts is if we want to question something or challenge something, there’s space to do that … The point of the session is to address an illness, a disease and you need clinical reasoning for that – you need a clinician here”. (student)

Problem solving activities

Problem solving activities promoted collaboration among small teams and the TBL class. Students felt they used the steps and tools of TBL to produce an end product during each class (mechanistic flow chart).

“The problem solving activities that we did through the TBL sessions were quite a good way to investigate the topic. The way that our groups worked was that we followed through a series of questions to make a chart in the end about the risk factors and the signs and symptoms of the diseases and then a great element was to be able to compare our groups chart with the other groups’ charts, and see maybe a different method of preparing the chart, or see what we missed in our chart and other groups had”. (student)