Resumen:
Physiology is a fundamental discipline to be studied in most Health Science
studies including Psychology. Physiology content is perceived by students as
rather difficult, who may lack vision on how to relate it with their professional
training. Therefore, identifying novel active and more engaging pedagogical
strategies for teaching physiology to psychology students may help to fill this
gap. In this pilot study, we used the PBL methodology developed around
a clinical case to evaluate psychology students’ experience and learning in
two laboratory classes modalities. The aim of this study was to compare the
undergraduates’ preference for laboratory classes taught either independently
(cohort 1, n = 87 students) or integrated into the PBL-oriented clinical case
(cohort 2, n = 92 students) for which laboratory classes were transformed into
Integrated Laboratory Classes (ILCs). The students’ academic performance was
also evaluated to look for quantitative differences between cohorts. We found
similar overall academic scores for the Physiology course between cohorts.
Interestingly, when we compared the academic scores obtained in the theoretical
content from each cohort, we found a sign...