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Table 2 Education theories informed educational methods

From: An innovative pharmacology curriculum for medical students: promoting higher order cognition, learner-centered coaching, and constructive feedback through a social pedagogy framework

 

Constructivism

Communities of Practice

Networked Learning

Key Features

• Learning is an active, contextualized process of constructing knowledge through experience.

• Active creators of own knowledge.

• Ask questions, explore, assess what we know.

• Experience and reflection.

• Learning is a social, collaborative process.

• People who have common interests collaborate over an extended period of time.

• Contribute ideas and strategies, determine solutions.

• Embrace share responsibility.

• Learning is perceiving connections between fields, ideas, and concepts.

• Use of internet technologies to learn and share information.

• Asynchronous, online, peer networks.

• Faculty guide discovery and answer key questions as needed.

• Learners encouraged to seek and share information on their own.

Educational Methods

• Individual learners answer 1 of 5 case-based, wiki assignment questions across Bloom’s taxonomy.

• Reflection upon other learners’ posts.

• Individual learners post 1 peer-teaching, follow-up comment.

• Small group wiki communities of n = 5 learners.

• Collaboration extended over M1 academic year.

• Social learning; Shared responsibility.

• Blackboard® Wiki Tool.

• 15 formative small group wiki assignments; 1 summative individual wiki assignment.

• Learners contribute ideas, strategies, solutions, comments, and ask additional questions of one another.

  1. Elements of constructivism, communities of practice theory, and networked learning theory used in the design of the social pedagogy model for pharmacology learning