Medical teacher
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Investigations of outcomes of interprofessional education as a component of the basic preparation of health and human service professionals have lacked a strong focus on student perceptions, the student voice. This qualitative study examined students' insights regarding the interprofessional component of an elective course offered to 23 students; five from medicine and six from each of pharmaceutical sciences, nursing and social work. Fourteen students participated in focus group interviews at the conclusion of the course and 12 participated in telephone interviews six months later. ⋯ Students perceived the use of practice-based learning, student interprofessional teams, and interprofessional collaboration in the classroom as particularly effective. The course contributed to students' development of their own professional voices and their understanding of those of other professions. Additional interpretive studies of students' experiences and those of faculty and professionals in practice are needed, particularly regarding strategies for increasing the effectiveness of experiential learning.
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The purpose of our study was the development and validation of a modified electronic key feature exam of clinical decision-making skills for undergraduate medical students. Therefore, the reliability of the test (15 items), the item difficulty level, the item-total correlations and correlations to other measures of knowledge (40 item MC-test and 580 items of German MC-National Licensing Exam, Part II) were calculated. Based on the guidelines provided by the Medical Council of Canada, a modified electronic key feature exam for internal medicine consisting of 15 key features (KFs) was developed for fifth year German medical students. ⋯ The items' difficulty level scores were between 0.3 and 0.8 and the item-total correlations between 0.0 and 0.4. Correlations between the results of the KF exam and the other measures of knowledge were intermediate (r between 0.44 and 0.47) as well as the learners' level of acceptance. The modified electronic KF examination is a feasible and reliable evaluation tool that may be implemented for the assessment of clinical undergraduate training.
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Students use three approaches to learning and studying: deep, surface and strategic. These are influenced by the learning environment. In response to the General Medical Council's report 'Tomorrow's Doctors', the second year of the medical course at the University of Edinburgh was changed to promote deep learning, with learning objectives constructed according to the SOLO taxonomy, learning methods such as problem-based learning and constructively aligned written assignments and examinations. ⋯ There are various possible explanations. The students already scored highly on deep approaches at the beginning of Year 2 and it may be difficult to increase the deep scores further, particularly over the relatively short period of the study. Alternatively, the effect of the changes in learning environment may not be strong enough to change entrenched approaches which have hitherto been successful.
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Feedback plays an important role in Postgraduate Medical Education and is indispensable in surgical training. Improvement in operating skills, for example, requires constant feedback between teacher and learner to promote reflection on performance. ⋯ The results were used in planning a Workshop on Giving Feedback for our faculty. The effectiveness of this Workshop will be assessed at a later date by administering the same questionnaire.
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Currently in-training evaluation in Kuwait depends on the use of the global rating scale at the end of clinical rotation clerkships. Such a scale is inconsistent, subjective, and suffers from deficiencies such as positive skewness of the distribution of ratings and poor reliability. The aim of the study was to assess the inter-rater variation and the reliability of the recently introduced Interaction Card (IC) method for evaluating clinical performance and to measure the agreement between trainees' overall performance evaluation by the currently used global rating scale and the IC summative evaluation. ⋯ There was low correlation (Spearman rank correlation coefficient, rs = 0.337), and low agreement (Kappa = 0.131) between the global rating scale and Interaction Cards summative evaluations. The IC method provided instantaneous formative feedback and summative evaluation for clinical performance to trainees. The method can be generalized to encompass training and examinations programmes for all categories of trainees in most clinical specialties.