The web of undergraduate skills

Although the primary goal of undergraduate medical education is to train students into becoming ‘competent’ doctors, this does not relieve physiology educators from the responsibility of encouraging undergraduate students to pursue physiology rigorously. Undergraduate students and sometimes their teachers do not know why they are learning or teaching what they are doing. Secondly, students’ appetite for rigorous pursuit of science decreases steadily as they go through 4½ years of the undergraduate medical course. The authors believe that besides knowledge of basic concepts, students’ ability to hypothesize and speculate, design experiments, draw insightful analogies, solve novel problems, communicate confidently with peers and teachers and constructively critique them, willingness to assume responsibilities toward advancing our understanding of science, and understanding of ethics, are all significant contributors to ‘success’. The authors discuss the importance of understanding the complex interaction between the skills mentioned above. Let alone ideal outcome measures in medical education 1 , undergraduate students must be able to feel and enjoy the ‘intelligence’ inherent in homeostatic regulatory systems and talk 2 physiology in the classroom, laboratory, and at the bedside, and teachers must assess this. When trained teachers start telling their students, “I’ll think about that good question of yours and get back to you”, an ambitious yet desirable benchmark in education would have been attained.