BMC medical education
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BMC medical education · Mar 2014
Use of online clinical videos for clinical skills training for medical students: benefits and challenges.
Multimedia learning has been shown effective in clinical skills training. Yet, use of technology presents both opportunities and challenges to learners. The present study investigated student use and perceptions of online clinical videos for learning clinical skills and in preparing for OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). This study aims to inform us how to make more effective us of these resources. ⋯ The present study confirms the overall positive impact of OSCE videos on student learning of clinical skills. Having faculty integrate these learning resources into their teaching, integrating interactive tools into this e-learning environment to foster interactions, and using mobile devices for convenient access are recommended to help students make more effective use of these resources.
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BMC medical education · Mar 2014
Practice effects in medical school entrance testing with the undergraduate medicine and health sciences admission test (UMAT).
The UMAT is widely used for selection into undergraduate medical and dental courses in Australia and New Zealand (NZ). It tests aptitudes thought to be especially relevant to medical studies and consists of 3 sections - logical reasoning and problem solving (UMAT-1), understanding people (UMAT-2) and non-verbal reasoning (UMAT-3). A substantial proportion of all candidates re-sit the UMAT. Re-sitting raises the issue as to what might be the precise magnitude and determinants of any practice effects on the UMAT and their implications for equity in subsequent selection processes. ⋯ Re-sitting the UMAT augments performance in each of its components together with the total UMAT percentile score. Whether this increase represents just an improvement in performance or an improvement in understanding of the variables and therefore competence needs to be further defined. If only the former, then practice effects may be introducing inequity in student selection for medical or dental schools in Australia or NZ.
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BMC medical education · Feb 2014
Predictors of early faculty attrition at one Academic Medical Center.
Faculty turnover threatens the research, teaching and clinical missions of medical schools. We measured early attrition among newly-hired medical school faculty and identified personal and institutional factors associated with early attrition. ⋯ In this pilot study, one-third of new faculty resigned within 3 years of hire. Greater awareness of predictors of early attrition may help schools identify threats to faculty career satisfaction and retention.
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BMC medical education · Feb 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialEducating novice practitioners to detect elder financial abuse: a randomised controlled trial.
Health and social care professionals are well positioned to identify and intervene in cases of elder financial abuse. An evidence-based educational intervention was developed to advance practitioners' decision-making in this domain. The objective was to test the effectiveness of a decision-training educational intervention on novices' ability to detect elder financial abuse. The research was funded by an E.S.R.C. grant reference RES-189-25-0334. ⋯ This freely available, web-based decision-training aid is an effective evidence-based educational resource. Health and social care professionals can use the resource to enhance their ability to detect elder financial abuse. It has been embedded in a web resource at http://www.elderfinancialabuse.co.uk.
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BMC medical education · Jan 2014
Teaching clinical reasoning by making thinking visible: an action research project with allied health clinical educators.
Clinical reasoning is fundamental to all forms of professional health practice, however it is also difficult to teach and learn because it is complex, tacit, and effectively invisible for students. In this paper we present an approach for teaching clinical reasoning based on making expert thinking visible and accessible to students. ⋯ We suggest that the making thinking visible approach has potential to assist educators to become more reflective about their clinical reasoning teaching and acts as a scaffold to assist them to articulate their own expert reasoning and for students to access and use.