Abstract:
A newly accredited department to train
Radiographers in the college of health sciences, University
of Cape Coast, Ghana was motivated by the great success
story of graduating Doctors from the medical school of the
same college that uses Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as
the main pedagogy. Therefore, the new Radiography
department decided to use PBL as the main mode of
pedagogy for the training of the radiographers. This study
seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of the PBL mode of
pedagogy from students’ perspective so that lessons can be
learnt thereof. A questionnaire was used to gather
responses from 272 students (190 males, 82 females)
reading diagnostic imaging technology (Radiography) and
diagnostic medical sonography programmes. The results
showed 100% response rate from the respondents. On
whether students prefer PBL to traditional lectures, 32.5%
agreed, 63.2% strongly agreed with only 2.2% and 1.5%
who disagreed and strongly disagreed respectively and
0.7% neither agreed nor disagreed. Also, 52.2% and 36.4%
of the respondents agreed that PBL develops competence
and confidence in self-directed learning, 37.5% and 55.5%
respondents further strongly agreed to the same set of
statements. However only 4.4% and 2.6% respectively
disagreed with the same set of statements with 2.2% and
3.3% respectively neither agreed nor disagreed. Majority
(59.1%) of the students identified inadequate resources to
carry out the PBL activities as their main challenge with
PBL. Therefore, from the students’ perspective, PBL mode
of pedagogy is appropriate for radiography education, it is
high-quality and has significantly impacted on students
clinical understanding, retention of information,
presentation, health promotion and skills development.
