Medical education
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Authenticity of instruction and student performance: a prospective randomised trial.
This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the authenticity of instructional formats and outcome measures within a pre-clerkship clinical reasoning course. ⋯ Increasing the authenticity of instructional formats does not appear to significantly improve clinical reasoning performance in a pre-clerkship course. Medical educators should balance increases in authenticity with factors such as cognitive load, subject area and learner experience when designing new instructional formats.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Techniques for teaching electrocardiogram interpretation: self-directed learning is less effective than a workshop or lecture.
Teaching 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation to students and residents is a challenge for medical educators. To date, few studies have compared the effectiveness of different techniques used for ECG teaching. ⋯ Compared with those taught using workshop- and lecture-based formats, medical students learning ECG interpretation by SDL had lower test scores.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Role of clinical context in residents' physical examination diagnostic accuracy.
Clinical context may act as both an aid to decision making and a source of bias contributing to medical error. The effect of clinical history, a form of clinical context, on the diagnostic accuracy of the physical examination is unknown. ⋯ Clinical context is associated with enhanced diagnostic accuracy of common valvular lesions. However, this effect seems linked to heuristic hypothesis generation and may predispose to premature diagnostic closure, anchoring and confirmation bias.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Peer teaching: a randomised controlled trial using student-teachers to teach musculoskeletal ultrasound.
This study (a post-intervention assessment) was designed to assess the effectiveness of peer-assisted learning (PAL) using student-teachers (STs) with limited training to teach complicated technical skills for interpreting ultrasound images of the shoulder. ⋯ Complicated technical skills can be adequately taught to students using the PAL system by STs with limited training. Self-teaching learning strategies are successful in contexts of limited teacher training. However, despite positive objective results, STs still face prejudice from students with regard to competency.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Experiential learning improves the learning and retention of endotracheal intubation.
Simulators provide an effective platform for the learning of clinical motor skills such as endotracheal intubation, although the optimal learning technique remains unidentified. We hypothesised that, for novices, experiential learning would improve the learning and retention of endotracheal intubation compared with guided learning. ⋯ Novices learned and retained the skill of endotracheal intubation better with experiential learning. This study suggests that experiential learning should be adopted for the teaching of endotracheal intubation and that refresher tuition at 3-monthly intervals will prevent the decay of this skill in infrequent users.