Proceduralizing The Art Of Clinical Skills Teaching

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Literature suggests that there are two common teaching methods in clinical skills are the four-stepapproach of Peyton and the theory of instructional design by Gagne. The combination of these two teachingmethods was planned and implemented in the undergraduate medical program at Avalon University, Curacao,in training and teaching clinical skills during the firsttwo years of the program. The objective behind developingthis teaching modality is to offer more chances to repeat the demonstration by the instructors, to rehearsal bystudents, and to provide instant feedback on specific concepts of clinical skills. This study aims to examinefurther and evaluate this teaching method for clinical skills.Methods: This is a quasi-experimental study that was conducted to evaluate the new teaching method. The datawere gathered in summer 2017, which is a control group and for another three groups; fall 2017, winter 2018,and summer 2018, which are study groups. A survey of course evaluations was developed to collect bothqualitative and quantitative feedback from students at the end of the course. The quantitative questionnaireincluded 17 questions used a five-point Likert scale with one of the following responses; one indicates stronglydisagree, two-disagree, three-neutral/no opinion, four-agree, and five-strongly agree. Qualitative analysis wasdone based on the responses from students for open-ended questions. Quantitative data were gathered even forstudents’ grades on the final assessments.Results: Students’ responses (survey questionnaire) data were analyzed for descriptive statistics. The responserate for the summer 2017 group (control) is 100% and 95.65%, 87.5%, and 90.9% for the three study groups,respectively. Students’ feedback for all questions showed improved satisfaction with the new method of teaching.The class performance (mean grade) of different groups wasshown a difference which is statistically significant(p<0.05) on the Kruskal-Wallis test.Conclusion: The new modality of teaching in clinical skills showed that students are more satisfied and alsoimproved students’ performance.