[Analysis of a proposal for changing the educational paradigm in bacteriology and virology. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba]

Abstract

The productive character of the scientific thought points out a methodological means that include the demand of the students' job about the information and not his mere reception and reproduction. It is essential to give the students the opportunity of discovering the cognitive processes used in the production of the scientific knowledge. In this work, we present the result of the starting of a workshop dynamic in a basic subject, the students' answers, and the analysis of the subject. In the Chair of Medical Bacteriology and Virology of the School of Medical Sciences, the National University of Córdoba, 1700 students attended classes in 1997. The subject was developed with the activities that worked the same contents from two different learning conceptions: (I) workshop activity, non obligatory, constructive, and (II) theorico-practical activity, obligatory and traditional. Two voluntary and anonymous interviews were done about the valuation that the student gave to these two activities and their basis, one in the middle and the other at the end of the course. 90.55% classified the traditional activity as positive, and 9.45% as negative. Regarding the workshop activity, the 60.5% classified it as positive and the 39.5% as negative. The same developed content with two activities made possible the analysis of the impact that the two different methodologies produced on the students. The student's answer to the traditional activity was better than the workshop activity (p < 0.001). The differences in the student's acceptance between the two option revealed the major difficulty of an alternative methodological strategy in the current educational model.