Submited on: 19 Mar 2013 08:59:20 PM GMT
Published on: 20 Mar 2013 06:50:18 AM GMT

Dear reviewers and readers

Thank you for your interest in our paper and for your comments. In the coming summer semester from May to August 2013 we plan to use small group learning more widely in Xavier University School of Medicine at Aruba. We plan to have sessions introducing students to small group work and plan to use the method during problem-based learning sessions, for critical appraisal of scientific literature, family health visits and early clinical exposure. We agree with the anonymous reviewer that our conclusions are subjective. This is borne out by the title of our manuscript which mentions ‘our experiences’. Regarding the effect of PBL on student learning studies in the literature have highlighted both positive and negative effects. Also at XUSOM, Aruba like in many other schools PBL will not be the predominant learning modality and will only supplement other learning methods.

We decided to also introduce small group learning methods because we believe these have important advantages in the education of future doctors which have been highlighted in a number of articles in the literature. We have published scientific reports about our experiences with small group learning in Nepal. At XUSOM, Aruba small group learning has just been introduced and will share more evidence once we have more experience with the learning method. We thank one of the reviewers for the suggestion to publish a scientific paper about our experiences which we will do soon.

In XUSOM the small group of 30 students was subdivided into four small groups of 7 or 8 students. We are in the process of training more facilitators and will be implementing a greater number of small group learning sessions from the next semester as described. We thank the reader for his suggestions which we will certainly try to implement.          

Dear reviewers and readers

Thank you for your interest in our paper and for your comments. In the coming summer semester from May to August 2013 we plan to use small group learning more widely in Xavier University School of Medicine at Aruba. We plan to have sessions introducing students to small group work and plan to use the method during problem-based learning sessions, for critical appraisal of scientific literature, family health visits and early clinical exposure. We agree with the anonymous reviewer that our conclusions are subjective. This is borne out by the title of our manuscript which mentions ‘our experiences’. Regarding the effect of PBL on student learning studies in the literature have highlighted both positive and negative effects. Also at XUSOM, Aruba like in many other schools PBL will not be the predominant learning modality and will only supplement other learning methods.

We decided to also introduce small group learning methods because we believe these have important advantages in the education of future doctors which have been highlighted in a number of articles in the literature. We have published scientific reports about our experiences with small group learning in Nepal. At XUSOM, Aruba small group learning has just been introduced and will share more evidence once we have more experience with the learning method. We thank one of the reviewers for the suggestion to publish a scientific paper about our experiences which we will do soon.

In XUSOM the small group of 30 students was subdivided into four small groups of 7 or 8 students. We are in the process of training more facilitators and will be implementing a greater number of small group learning sessions from the next semester as described. We thank the reader for his suggestions which we will certainly try to implement.