Developing and investigating an electronic performance support system for skill learning in the simulation environment

Abstract

Health education consists of processes, which prioritise developing skills and attitudes as well as knowledge and in which developing these skills and attitudes requires working with real patients for a large part of the training. 1 When it turns out to be difficult to work with real patients, students mostly make use of simulations. 2 Simulations provide learners with a great advantage if it is difficult, risky and costly to provide a real clinical practice setting. 3 When the topic is addressed in terms of health education, training that is based on simulation is quite an effective way to improve health professionals' knowledge, skills and attitudes without potentially putting patients at risk. [1][2][3][4] It is stated that making use of simulations in health education has four basic benefits. 5 These benefits can be listed as follows: (1) broadening educational experience (enriching), (2) improving patient safety,(3) cost-benefit efficiency and (4) sustainable professional development opportunities. Previous researches have shown that taking advantage of simulation has positive effects on gaining clinical skills according to participants' views. [4][5][6] There are limited studies about transfer of simulation-based training programme outcomes to the clinical environment. It has been shown that clinical skills that are gained through simulation-based training can be successfully transferred to real clinical settings. 7,8 In these studies, 7,8 the performances of the participants in the clinics were observed via checklist by evaluators