Fugui Qi,1,* Yizhu Chen,2,* Zhao Li,1 Tao Lei,1 Jianqi Wang,1 Guohua Lu1 

1Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Fourth Military Medical University, Xi’An, 710032, People’s Republic of China; 2The Primary School Attached to Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’An, 710065, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Guohua Lu, Email lugh1976@fmmu.edu.cn

Purpose: Current approaches to teaching Biomedical Engineering (BME)-related computer courses in medical universities often have unsatisfactory outcomes. A “Microcomputer Principles and Interface Technology” course was taken as a typical example to explore a new teaching method based on the idea of associative analogy.
Methods: Associative analogy was used as a core teaching principle. This puts special emphasis on the use of systematic associative analogies to promote systematic understanding and memorization of scattered knowledge points. Associative analogies form a multi-branch extension or logical-chain extension surrounding one practical example. This approach is also committed to transforming associative analogies into a constant feature of students’ self-learning. Associative analogy teaching was applied over 2 years in a medical university in China and end of course questionnaires were given to students, teachers, and school experts.
Results: The three-level evaluation results show that associative analogy teaching not only assists teachers and enhances the classroom atmosphere and interest in learning, but also helps cultivate an associative analogy learning mindset amongst students.
Conclusion: Associative analogy teaching has a beneficial impact on students’ acquisition of course knowledge, independence of learning, and divergent thinking. It also has positive possibilities for education and teaching reform, and teachers’ capacity for innovative teaching. Next directions will include the application of this teaching method to more computer courses to collect more teaching data. This will help to inform a more refined quantitative evaluation of the method’s future potential.

Keywords: associative analogy, biomedical engineering, microcomputer principles and interface technology, computer course, medical university