Program components that encourage students in a traditional medical curriculum to accept innovative teaching methods

Which features of innovative teaching programs promote their acceptability to students? What influence do these features have on learning? Can they be transferred to other programs? Questionnaires were administered to students (a) after each of the first 2 years of operation of three small‐group, case‐based learning programs and (b) 2 years later, after two of the programs were modified to incorporate popular features that had been revealed by the third program. Features that promoted acceptance by students, even when adopted by teachers and courses different from the original program, were giving students adequate guidance, requiring that they be prepared for wide‐ranging discussion, making tutors available continuously, and providing appropriate activities for discussion sessions. The fact that the courses also promoted learning was apparent from the finding that performance by the students on final examinations was at least as good after implementation of the new programs as it had been before their introduction.