Engaging Students in Combined Didactic and Problem-Solving Sessions in a Large Class-Size Medical School

At Chicago Medical School/Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, physiology instruction to 1 st year medical students (enrollment of ~200 students) has been mostly didactic until recently. In addition, live discussions of clinical cases once a week provide students with the opportunity to work in small groups of ~8 students together with a preceptor. Two major issues with the current teaching method are that the faculty-student interaction is minimal and the student attendance is low, with majority of them studying on their own using outside resources. To enhance student engagement and satisfaction, increase student attendance and improve learning retention, we have initiated a problem-based approach combined with traditional lecture-based learning. The didactic phase consists of slides that have figures to illustrate high-yield materials. The problem-based discussion phase includes simple to more complex clinical cases and/or physiological scenarios related to the lecture content. The proportion of time periods spent on didactic and problem-solving sessions vary depending on the topic of the lecture. The authors of this abstract teach Endocrinology-Reproduction (EC) and Cardiovascular (DK) physiology within an integrated organ/system-based curriculum and also direct these courses. Here we describe the instruction of two physiology topics (male reproduction and cardiac physiology) using the combined high-yield lecture-based content with 20-30 min of problem-based learning. Student evaluations (rated as excellent, good, adequate or unacceptable) consisting of course organization, clinical and basic science integration, content and objectives, and effectiveness of exams and assessments and quality of teaching suggested that the teaching in this combined format was highly effective. We also describe our own experience of teaching physiology using the combined teaching method and offer suggestions for further improvements. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.