Recently a sample of 11,000 doctors was asked to name the most important medical advance in the last 200 years.The results make interesting reading. What an cracking activity it would make to ask students to work in small groups to generate their top 10 and then rank them and then to guess which the doctors would value most highly.
A new smart task will appear on the site shortly giving you the final top ten choices, and the rank order, that this large survey of doctors came up with. Subscribers can request the draft of the lesson and its resources now by email.
I wonder what the top ten might include? In alphabetical order:
anaesthesia and antibiotics would probably be there, but what about discovery of DNA structure? At the other end of the alphabet, how about : sanitation in the form of clean water and sewage disposal, tissue culture and vaccines?
This task works really well as students break from the textbook and engage with real evidence from a large number of practitioners. Interestingly, students feel the task is more relevant because of this and apply themselves much better than they do with most textbook tasks.
