Lifelong Learning: The Final Frontier

Where is the edge of your knowledge? 
And once you discover that edge, how do you develop your skills to push beyond your present limits?

This is the voyage of every healthcare practitioner.  Your lifelong career begins with your four-year mission:

• to explore strange new worlds of human biology and disease
• to seek out new knowledge and new treatments to improve the human condition and reduce the burden of suffering
• to boldly go where your mind and your body have never gone before
• to transform yourself from a passive, dependent learner to an active, self-directed learner, prepared to embark on a life-long journey of service:
  • to patients who are suffering
  • to a human community in need of new knowledge
  • to future students of health care, who will seek you out for mentoring.

During each semester of Problem Based Learning, you will add incrementally to your research tools, as described below, and you will practice your new skills in preparation to function independently as a member of the clinical housestaff.

Explore with passion!  

Ralph Aarons, MD, PhD
Course Director
Problem Based Learning

Fall Semester, First Year

Students will have the ability to:

• Locate print resources in the library using the National Library of Medicine's classification system.
• Navigate electronic textbooks by using the search and browse features.
• Differentiate authoritative web sites from non-authoritative web sites.
• Explore web sites made available through HHSL research guides and Google.

Spring Semester, First Year

Students will have the ability to:

• Recognize resources that are appropriate for specific research needs.
• Utilize Boolean combinations and truncated keywords to search Web of Science and Ovid databases.
• Employ standard Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in formulating MEDLINE searches.
• Limit results in MEDLINE search strategies using filters.
• Access full text articles licensed or held by Tufts.

Fall Semester, Second Year

Students will have the ability to:

• Develop a MEDLINE search strategy that yields an answer to a specific clinical question.
• Formulate a MEDLINE search that incorporates the use of MESH subheadings.
• Utilize limits in an Ovid MEDLINE search that yields evidence-based medicine literature.