Curriculum reform at Chinese medical schools: What have we learned?

AbstractIntroduction: Curriculum reform at Chinese medical schools has attracted a lot of attention recently. Several leading medical schools in China have undergone exploratory reforms and in so doing, have accumulated significant experience and have made considerable progress.Methods: An analysis of the reforms conducted by 38 Chinese medical colleges that were targeted by the government for upgrade was performed. Drawing from both domestic and international literature, we designed a questionnaire to determine what types of curricular reforms have occurred at these institutions and how they were implemented. Major questions touched upon the purpose of the reforms, curricular patterns, improvements in teaching methods post-reform, changes made to evaluation systems post-reform, intra-university reform assessment, and what difficulties the schools faced when instituting the reforms. Besides the questionnaire, relevant administrators from each medical school were also interviewed to obtain more qualitative...