INNOVATIVE TEACHING INSTRUMENT AS A LEARNING ENHANCER IN THE PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING METHODOLOGY

Introduction and objectives: Despite its growth in the academic scene, the Problem-Based Learning methodology still has applicability issues, such as the students’ difficult adaptation to this new kind of teaching. With a view to help students in their learning and facilitate knowledge acquisition, the authors used an innovative pedagogical instrument, which was called “levelling”. Method: The “levelling” consisted in weekly meetings in which a teacher gathered the students of the immunology module in a classroom and reviewed the main points studied in the previous week through a new concept map. Every meeting was a moment the students could expose their main doubts about what they have studied. Thus, the sequence of topics discussed was not set by the teacher, but the students’s questions. Using tools like concept maps and videos, the teacher was able to answer those questions. To do that, the teacher only use as reference what had already been learned by the students during tutoring groups and videos about the discussed subject. Results and conclusions: This instrument showed a great potential to maximize the students’ learning, so being an excellent strategy to allow a better assimilation of the studied content without putting aside the main characteristics of the Problem-Based Learning, in which students should be the primary agents of their learning.