School of Medicine

Problem based learning (PBL) is an education model designed to teach students new content and skills by encouraging them to work cooperatively with peers through complex problems and questions. The PBL model is based on adult learning theory and designed to stimulate challenge acceptance and learning curiosity among students.v The purpose of our study was to evaluate if enforcing standards for presentations during PBL sessions improved students’ perceived efficacy and value of the course. Nine, first‐year medical students from the University of California‐San Diego School of Medicine were selected to participate in the study. Data was collected via student surveys before and after implementing and enforcing specific requirements for student presentations. Questions on the surveys were designed to assess the effects of new student presentation guidelines on students’ perceptions of their own presentations’ value/efficacy, students’ perceptions on their classmates’ presentations’ value/efficacy, and students’ perceptions on the overall value of PBL sessions. Comparison of pre‐ and postintervention survey results showed significant improvement on two questions assessing student perceptions of their own presentation quality. While the data from this study was relatively inconclusive, the results were confounded by the project’s small sample size. Despite the small sample size, there is some evidence that enforcing standard guidelines for PBL presentations does improve students’ perceptions of their own presentations’ efficacy and value. Further research on student presentations should be pursued to better evaluate this finding and possibly improve problem‐based learning curricula.