The marriage of a traditional lecture-based curriculum and problem-based learning: are the offspring vigorous?

In 1991, the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, E. Lansing, MI, USA implemented a curriculum that married a lecture-based first-year program with a problem-based curriculum in the second year. The achievement of the original curricular goals was evaluated using student surveys, alumni surveys, residency director surveys, and student performance measures. The preponderance of indicators demonstrates that this unusual curricular structure was successful in improving students' perceptions of and performance in basic sciences without sacrificing the school's tradition of a strong psychosocial orientation. Based on constructivist views of learning theory, it is hypothesized that the curriculum promotes solid knowledge construction by providing the introduction to each basic science discipline in the first year upon which integrated conceptions are more readily built during the second year.