River Publishers Series in Innovation and Change in Education – serie

In recent decades, medicine and health education has been challenged worldwide by changes in its profession. Being a doctor nowadays encompasses much more than having biomedical knowledge and includes interdisciplinary skills related to societal needs, communication skills, and ethical consideration, among other things. In order to provide these skills and competences, many medical schools are implementing changes in different aspects of the education. These changes are also occurring in China. In the past twenty years, medical education in China has initiated a series of reforms. The current reforms have mainly been led by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health. These initial actions have evidenced both positive and negative attitudes and reactions. Is there a need to make further reforms and changes? If so, in what aspects? This book documents a national investigation of attitudes from teaching staff on the reforms and changes. Nearly 1800 teaching staff from 23 medical universities participated in this investigation. The results suggest that sustainable educational change demands not only supports from policy-makers and leaderships, but also active participation from teaching staff. In order for the implementation of reforms and changes to be successful, two factors are essential from the teaching staff’s perspective. First, it is important for teaching staff to gain a deep understanding of educational reform and change, and second, they should develop appropriate skills to be able to conduct the reforms through their teaching practice. To provide these two factors, institutional facilitation is necessary and crucial.

As a promising educational approach, PBL (Problem Based Learning) has been adopted by an increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide to replace the traditional lectured based educational approach. However, the organizational change towards PBL is not easy for higher education institutions, especially for those with a long history of Lecture Based Learning. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the challenges and obstacles for higher education institutions which are implementing PBL. In order to address the research concern, this book involves in an intensive exploration of two universities which are transforming their traditional educational approaches to PBL. Specifically, this book is concerned with how managers, staff members, and students interpret PBL and its implementation. It reveals that the challenges for implementing PBL are closely linked to organizational members’ conception of PBL, social learning and motivation at the university. The conclusions are specified as: firstly, the organizational members’ understanding of PBL and social learning are quite diverse, and some of them are not consistent with the managerial attempts. They may create huge tensions or chaos at the university, depending on which strategy the mangers have employed. Further, the organizational members’ understandings of PBL are more concerned with teaching and curriculum design rather than learning, which should be highlighted within PBL context. Besides, staff members have to struggle between different roles due to the complexity of the university in modern society, and some tasks such as researching will distract them from participating in teaching activities and thus undermine PBL implementation. Finally, the university has to make reflections on how to keep a balance between the use of normative approaches to guarantee organizational effectiveness and the intention of giving staff more freedom to make innovations and create new possibilities.

In China, talent development has been one of the key areas of attention in national focus for the development of science and technology, education, and other areas over the past three decades, and it is especially emphasized in the national outline for medium- and long-term educational reform and development. Beijing is the leading city in educational reform, especially in the area of gifted education in mainland China. Over the past 35 years, through constant exploration and research, a comprehensive gifted education system called the Beijing Model of Gifted Education and Talent Development (BMGETD) has gradually been developed. This book presents a summary of the educational practices used in, and the research done on the BMGETD over these decades. This includes several patterns for gifted education, such as acceleration in special classes, special classes without acceleration, enrichment within regular classes, and a joint program among high schools, universities, and professional academic institutions.