Instructional design and practice of early exposure to clinical activities under the guidance of con-structivism

Objective To explore the reasonable “early exposure to clinical practice” teaching form and content of 8-year medical students under the guidance of constructivism. Methods Early exposure to clinical activities is divided into two parts：The first stage was arranged in accordance with the course of the Peking University Health Science Center, to provide students with a variety of clinical scenarios and medical work. The second stage was based on self-conceived of the students after the first stage. Teachers set alternative teaching content. The students chose the content by themselves, participate in the design trainee, prepare the knowledge and the division of labor among the group. After the second stage of early exposure to clinical activities, the questionnaire of 63 students were used to compare the purpose, attitude, learning ability and harvesting with in the first stage, and to evaluate the effects of early exposure to clinical activities in the new mode. Results The students gained more explicit purpose, larger interest and enthusiasm to. They enhanced significantly the ability to communicate with patients and he medical staff. The student group cooperative learning initiative has also been improved significantly. In addition, the harvest of students were more in the second stage of early exposure to clinical practice than before, which reflected in many aspects such as perceptual knowledge and interest in clinical medicine, clinical processes and hospital management. The vast majority of students have deeper feelings of medical ethics and the concept of love wounds. They have more adequate psychological preparation of future access＆amp;nbsp;to clinical learning. Conclusions Integrating the constructivist theory into the early exposure to clinical activities could help students improving the capability of “self-learning” and “collaborative learning”, which will not only help to increase the students’ perceptual knowledge and stimulate interest in learning, and implement full medical the professionalism education philosophy, but also to prepare for the reform of the future clinical medical education curriculum system. Key words: Early exposure to clinical practice; Medical students; Constructivism; Clinical teaching; Practice