Trois méthodes pédagogiques en formations médicale et pharmaceutique : L’APP, les Tests de Progression et les ECOS

During the four last decades, Higher Education has tried to re-equilibrate the ratio between the acquisition of knowledge and they development of competencies (being able to act efficiently and ethically in complex situations). Pursuing this objective, in faculties of pharmacy and of medicine, a series of methods – audacious in their time- have been initiated. Three of them are described hereafter. For each of them, we will consider how their field implementation has evolved as well as validity and efficiency issues. The first one is The Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach, in which teaching is replaced by learning, i.e. in which students themselves, after having been motivated by a case presented b y a simulated patient, decide which contents to study and search, in an autonomous way, pieces of information in a huge “Study landscape” full of books and on the internet. In the second strategy, named “Progress Tests”, students have to pass, four times per year, a test on the medical knowledge that should be mastered by a general practitioner. Since during the 6 years of their medical studies he/she passes 24 (not identical but equivalent) tests, each student can observe his/her own progression. The third strategy deals both with training and with evaluation, and, as PBL, relies on role playing. It consists in students spending a few minutes (7 for instance) in various “stations” where they play the role of the professional (a pharmacist, a doctor) facing a concrete situation presented by a simulated patient. These three methods are described on the basis of their concrete implementation in two universities, the Maastricht and the Liège ones. An important common point they share is that they could be implemented thanks to the adoption of a program-referenced approach. This article presents these three educational strategies and the concepts that underpin them.