Background: Professional self-identity is a 'state of mind' -identifying one's-self as a member of a professional group. Delayed professional self-identity is a barrier to successful transition from student to professional. Current trends in medical education limit student doctors' legitimate peripheral participation and may retard their developing professional self-identity compared with other health and social care students. Aims: Develop a tool to monitor the development of professional self-identity to operate across the different health and social care professions and evaluate the tool with student doctors before wider data collection. Method: Content analysis of relevant curricula, mapped to professional standards documents, defined initial content. Field tests across 10 professional groups refined questionnaire items. A cross-sectional study on 496 student doctors evaluated validity on the basis of internal structure and relationships with external variables. Results: The 9-item questionnaire indicates a three-factor structure reflecting 'interpersonal tasks', 'generic attributes' and 'profession-specific elements'. Students with greater previous experience of health or social care roles, and students with a more positive attitude to qualification had significantly more advanced scores than their peers. Scores advanced through the curriculum showing step changes after the start of clinical attachments. Conclusions: The data provides sufficient evidence of validity with student doctors to justify wider data collection.
Using video based scenarios with an authentic COPD patient and a home healthcare registered nurse as actors contributed to increased realism. Using different theoretical approaches in the SG design was considered an advantage of the design process. The SG was perceived as being useful, usable, and satisfying. The achievement of the desired functionality and the minimization of user-computer interface issues emphasize the importance of conducting a usability evaluation during the SG development process.
Objective. To identify whether there was measurable impact of a specific computer-assisted learning (CAL) package, "Virtual Rheumatology," on the learning of musculoskeletal examination skills by medical students. Methods. We conducted 2 parallel, cluster-randomized controlled trials using undergraduate curricula at 2 locations: Newcastle and London, UK. Medical students attending a musculoskeletal rotation were allocated to the intervention (Virtual Rheumatology CD) or the control arm of the study by placement group. A formative 14-item objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) assessment on the examination of shoulder and/or knee joints was the main outcome measure at Newcastle. At London, a 17-item knee station formed part of the summative OSCE. We also used a questionnaire including a 15-item confidence log (C-Log) for self assessment of musculoskeletal examination skills and knowledge. Analysis was by intention to teach. Results. At Newcastle, there were 112 students in the CD allocated group and 129 in the non-CD group. The CD allocated group performed significantly better on the OSCE (P ؍ 0.002) and C-Log (P ؍ 0.005) than the non-CD group. At London, there were 48 students in the CD allocated group and 65 in the non-CD group. The CD allocated group performed better on the knee OSCE than the non-CD group (adjusted P ؍ 0.040), but there was little difference in the change in C-Log scores from baseline to followup between the 2 groups (P ؍ 0.582). Conclusion. The Virtual Rheumatology CD has a positive impact on the acquisition of musculoskeletal examination skills in medical students. Further study is needed to see if similar advantages could be gained in other clinical specialities and how CAL resources could be effectively integrated into the medical curriculum.
Objective. Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is a key part of medical student assessment. Currently, assessment is performed by medical examiners in situ. Our objective was to determine whether assessment by videotaped OSCE is as reliable as live OSCE assessment. Methods. Participants were 95 undergraduate medical students attending their musculoskeletal week at Freeman Hospital, Newcastle (UK). Student performance on OSCE stations for shoulder or knee examinations was assessed by experienced rheumatologists. The stations were also videotaped and scored by a rheumatologist independently. The examinations consisted of a 14-item checklist and a global rating scale (GRS). Results. Mean values for the shoulder OSCE checklist were 17.9 by live assessment and 17.4 by video (n ؍ 50), and 20.9 and 20.0 for live and video knee assessment, respectively (n ؍ 45). Intraclass correlation coefficients for shoulder and knee checklists were 0.55 and 0.58, respectively, indicating moderate reliability between live and video scores for the OSCE checklists. GRS scores were less reliable than checklist scores. There was 84% agreement in the classification of examination grades between live and video checklist scores for the shoulder and 87% agreement for the knee ( ؍ 0.43 and 0.51, respectively; P < 0.001). Conclusion. Video OSCE has the potential to be reliable and offers some advantages over live OSCE including more efficient use of examiners' time, increased fairness, and better monitoring of standards across various schools/sites. However, further work is needed to support our findings and to implement and evaluate the quality assurance issues identified in this work before justifiable recommendations can be made.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.