Students' approaches and attitudes to solving computer presented problems

The ‘diseases oriented’ approach to teaching medicine was used as a basis for computer presented problems to first and second year clinical students. Performance on one of the problems was analysed retrospectively to compare students who had attended innovatory Problem Based Learning (PBL) tutorials with those who experienced only the computer presentations. Results suggest that after such tutorial experience, students reached diagnoses quicker, displayed less rigid history taking, and were more responsive to the information they gathered.