Purpose Tzu Chi University’s anatomy curriculum incorporates interaction with donors’ families and regards body donors as silent teachers and altruistic role models. In this silent mentor program (SMP), students learn about their donor’s life before dissection to better appreciate the selfless donation. This study explores the influence of the program on students’ humanistic literacy based on student letters to silent mentors, which students wrote near the end of the program and laid by the silent mentor during the coffining ceremony. Method The study included 125 letters from third-year medical students who took the gross anatomy curriculum in academic years 2015, 2016, and 2017. With student consent, the program collated and published the letters in the open-access SMP yearbook. Using thematic analysis, the authors manually analyzed the letters in their original Mandarin, with the names of students made anonymous to ensure the authors were blind to students’ identity throughout the study. Results The analysis identified 3 themes and 11 subthemes. Theme 1, my silent mentor, included 3 subthemes: life characteristics, altruistic attitude, and expectation of offering body. Theme 2, connection to silent mentor and family, included 4 subthemes: intersubjective bonding, emotive first encounter, spiritual communication, and encouragement from silent mentor. Theme 3, reflection and transformation, included 4 subthemes: reflection on life and death, professional self-expectation, inner transformation, and feedback action. Conclusions The findings suggest that interactions with donors’ families increased students’ appreciation of the donation and enhanced students’ humanistic literacy. Further, the letters seem to indicate that the SMP inspired students to develop a grateful, respectful, and empathic attitude toward life and their career. Thus, by implementing similar programs, gross anatomy curricula could go beyond the acquisition of structural knowledge to the cultivation of medical students’ humanistic literacy.

Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been widely acknowledged as a core element of today’s foreign language education. However, even though the importance of intercultural language teaching is commonly recognized among adult learners and at the post-secondary level, teachers of adolescent English learners often find it hard to effectively incorporate culture into English learning because of the lack of an instructional model facilitating their students’ intercultural development and English learning experiences. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether integrating intercultural learning into an online EFL curriculum can elevate teenage EFL students’ L2 motivation, intercultural communicative competence, and English proficiency. The researchers used a quasi-experimental design by randomly selecting two eighth-grade classes in a secondary school in northern Thailand, with one class designated as the experimental group (N = 31) and the other as the control group (N = 28). The effects of this teaching experiment were then examined using both quantitative and qualitative data. The findings demonstrated that the students in the experimental group showed a greater improvement compared with those of the students in the control group after an 8-week, interculturally embedded English curriculum. The results suggested that ICC is conducive to adolescent EFL students’ intercultural development as well as their English learning motivation and outcome. The applications of ICC-based EFL instruction in similar contexts are discussed.

No abstract

Background Medicine and nursing are not only empirical sciences but also a type of artistry with humanistic quality. Therefore, humanistic education of medical and nursing students in medical schools is internationally emphasized, with an aim to nurture students to expand their medical work beyond physical examination of patients to taking care of them at the psychological and social levels, and become “good doctors” with humanistic quality. The purpose of this study is to develop an appropriate assessment tool for measuring the humanistic caring competence of medical and nursing students and test its psychometric properties. Methods Questions were first designed based on focus group interviews and the Delphi method. After that, 38 questions were drafted using a Likert five-point scale. In the psychometric testing, the participants include medical students undergoing clinical training, nursing students who had started clinical practice before graduating from the school, and those participating in the two-year postgraduate training program for nurses. The obtained data were then analyzed with SPSS 22.0 and Mplus. Results In the pilot test, the sample included 155 medical and nursing students. After the exploratory factor analysis, 19 items and 4 factors were obtained, namely “self-awareness,” “patient-caring,” “being attentive to medical information,” and “social-environmental caring,” and the total explained variance is 74.03%. In the formal test, 331 medical students were included in the sample to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. The internal consistency of each subscale is between 0.74 to 0.88, while that of the whole scale is 0.93; the model fit indices, convergent and discriminant vadility are also up to the standard. This result confirms that the scale has a good psychometric properties in terms of the reliability and validity. In the comparison of background variables, students with different gender, ages, religious beliefs, medical service experiences, and volunteer service experiences have different performances in different dimensions of humanistic caring. Conclusions This scale demonstrates good to excellent model fit indices, reliability and validity and can be used as an assessment tool for measuring the effectiveness of humanistic education for medical and nursing students.