The debate as a tool for science learning and evaluation of scientific workapplication to postgraduate teaching in biomedicine

Resumen

One of the most difficult tasks in biomedicine research training is writing the discussion of scientific reports like the Master Thesis or Degree Final Project. Debate may be a learning strategy to develop critical thinking, formal analysis, argumentation, and literature searching. We applied debate-based learning in a Biomedical master’s degree, at the University of Alcalá in Spain. Students were divided into two teams, one in favor and one against the publication of a yet unpublished scientific paper. Each team has a mentor that supervised the preparation of the debate and explained the goals that should be achieved. In the debate session, first, the affirmative team had 5 min to present the background of the article and the negative group 5 min to explain the objectives and experiments performed in the paper. Then, the affirmative team had 7 min to argument the points in favor and defend why the paper should be published. The negative group has seven minutes to expose the points against and defend why the paper should be rejected. After both sides have a chance to speak, both teams have 7 minutes to prepare a rebuttal and summary which is exposed in 2 min. Finally, the attending students were asked to make a critical judgment about the debate, to vote which group has won, and to select a “final decision” on the preprint paper (i.e., to accept or reject the paper). Both the groups that participate in the debate and the groups that attend the debate were evaluated by rubrics. Students’ appreciation of the debate-based activity was assessed by several surveys about satisfaction. Answers indicate that the activity was greatly appreciated by the students pointing to critical thinking and oral communication as the most developed skills during the debate learning activity. Moreover, faculty surveys about students’ skills and learning outcomes were also satisfactory and they declared that students improved their analytical reasoning, literature searching, and argumentation. This was evidenced by the higher level of student assessment as compared to past academic years. The results show that this tool makes it possible to develop the skills necessary to properly write scientific articles and research discussions. Therefore, we propose the use of debate as a learning strategy in biomedicine and the addition of the debate-based teaching method into the biomedical curricula.