Writing Skills of Medical Students

Five hundred words expressing an opinion on the open access debate.  That's what I ask of the students during my section of our Scholar's Week course on advanced topics in information management.  I try, several times during the lecture session, to emphasize that I want them to express an opinion.  I want them to think about the issues.  Nevertheless, when the essays come back, most of them simply regurgitate what I've recounted in the lecture or what they've read in the articles I've assigned.  These are third & fourth year students, and they're well skilled in giving back to their professors what they think are the right answers.  By and large, they're not very good at expressing their own opinions.

I'm sure they have opinions.  I suspect the problem is that they're not willing to go on record with them because they don't know me and so it's not safe.  For them, this is all about passing another requirement, not about engaging with issues, and in the brief time that I have them, I'm not going to be able to make much of a dent in that. 

Which is not to say that there aren't glimmers of insight, and the occasional sentences that show someone really is thinking about what their role in the development of scholarly communication might be.   My goal is to plant just a couple of seeds and hope that somewhere along the way, they bear fruit.

Comments

[The other Mark]

Scott, as a philosophy major, I think you are witnessing the clash of Snow's Two Cultures. Remember, almost all of these kids were science majors. They learned facts, and were able to spit them out reasonably well on tests, good enough to get into medical school. There are no opinions on chemical reactions or the names of bones and muscles, only facts. They may, in time, get comfortable enough with their knowledge to be able to express an opinion about the medical sciences, but they're not there yet. BTW, does UAB have any sort of medical humanities course? That's a good place to get opinions.

[T Scott]

I think you're exactly right. Like all medical schools we pay lip service to teaching critical thinking, but I don't think we do a very good job of it. There's not a separate course in medical humanities, although issues of ethics, history, professionalism, etc. are discussed within the intro to medicine course.