A mentoring system with psychological and pedagogical support: The case of the Equilibrium ‘young doctor’ school for children

Abstract

The rapid development of medicine, the use of digital technologies in various medical fields and the use of modern materials and methods of treatment make it necessary to introduce innovative teaching methods into the educational process. For this purpose, the Department of Fundamental and Clinical Biochemistry of Kuban State Medical University (KubSMU) opened the Equilibrium ‘young doctor’ school which aims at early professional orientation of children of grades 5–9. The specific of the learning process is that schoolchildren gain knowledge taking part in practical activities carried out using a mentoring system with psychological and pedagogical support, which makes it possible to form professional skills necessary for the future profession of a doctor. The mentoring system is implemented through various interactions between the teacher, university student and schoolchild. Due to the specifics of the courses, the mentors are selected from among those university students who have secondary vocational education or work experience in the relevant areas, such as dentistry (for the ‘young dentist’ class), pharmacy (the ‘young pharmacist’ class) and epidemiology (the ‘young epidemiologist’ class). The content of all courses at the Equilibrium school is based on the integrative modular approach (Balachevskaya 2007), which has advantages over traditional methods — specifically, the place of each module in the curriculum may change depending on the age and individual characteristics of schoolchildren, as each module has a logical completeness in terms of the learning outcomes. After studying each module, schoolchildren pass separate tests on the theoretical material and tests focusing on practical work. The tests show high rates of knowledge retention and reproducibility of professional skills, which is consistent with the purpose of our study of early professional orientation.