False certainty in the acquisition of anatomical and physiotherapeutic knowledge.

BACKGROUND: Efficient metacognitive monitoring, that is the monitoring of one's own thought processes and specifically one's state of knowledge, is essential for effective clinical reasoning. Knowing what one does and does not know is a competency that students of health professions need to develop. Students often tend to develop false certainty in their own knowledge in the longer course of their education, but the time frame that is required for this effect to occur has remained unclear. We investigated whether students developed false certainty already after one course unit. METHODS: This study analysed data from one sample of medical students and four samples of physiotherapy students in two formal educational settings (total N = 255) who took knowledge tests before and after a course unit. We examined changes in students' confidence separately for correctly and incorrectly answered questions and analysed their ability to assign higher levels of confidence to correct answers than to incorrect answers (discrimination ability). RESULTS: Students' knowledge as well as confidence in their correct answers in knowledge tests increased after learning. However, consistently for all samples, confidence in incorrect answers increased as well. Students' discrimination ability improved only in two out of the five samples. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are in line with recent research on confidence increase of health professions students during education. Extending those findings, our study demonstrated that learning in two different formal educational settings increased confidence not only in correct but also in incorrect answers to knowledge questions already after just one learning session. Our findings highlight the importance of improving metacognition in the education of health professionals-especially their ability to know what they do not know.

Observing Interprofessional Collaboration: Impact on Attitude and Knowledge Acquisition.

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in the medical field is an important factor for good clinical outcomes and should be taught as early as in undergraduate medical education. Since implementing IPC training is an organizational challenge, students are often limited in their opportunities to experience real-life IPC. Therefore, an approach where students observe successful IPC activities of role models in an applied anatomical format was proposed. It was studied whether observing IPC activities in undergraduate anatomical education has an impact on both students' attitude toward IPC and on knowledge acquisition. Further, it was examined whether the attitudes and knowledge of students from different medical disciplines were influenced in different ways. Therefore, 75 medical students and thirty-eight physiotherapy students participated in a study with the task of observing a live broadcast of an interprofessional teaching session. Participants were asked about their attitudes toward interprofessional learning, their evaluation of professional responsibilities, and their profession-specific knowledge before and after observing the IPC session. The participants' attitude toward interprofessional learning improved for both groups of students. Moreover, students of physiotherapy adjusted their evaluation of their own and others' professional responsibilities after observing IPC. In both student groups, knowledge increased, in particular, with respect to the field of knowledge in other professions. So, observing IPC can modify students' attitudes and support knowledge acquisition. The implementation of IPC observations provides students from various healthcare disciplines with a clearer impression of professionals' responsibilities and gives learners the opportunity to acquire knowledge from healthcare fields unfamiliar to them.

Observing Inter-Professional Videos: Impact of Collaboration Between Physicians and Psychologists on Attitude and Knowledge Acquisition.

BACKGROUND: Inter-professional collaboration (IPC) is an important prerequisite for successful patient care. Even though inter-professional education (IPE) is increasingly common in undergraduate medical education, few IPE approaches explicitly address the IPC among medical students and students of psychology. IPE videos can be used to give learners the opportunity to gather relevant knowledge from different professional perspectives. So far it has been unclear whether it is enough when the topic of the video itself is inter-professional or if it is necessary for experts from different professions explicitly to appear in the video. METHODS: In an online experiment, medical students watched 1 of 2 videos about Parkinson's disease (PD) and the care of PD patients. The information was either provided by protagonists from only 1 profession (ie, physicians; mono-professional condition) or provided by protagonists from 2 different professions (ie, physicians and a psychologist; inter-professional condition). Attitude toward inter-professional interaction and learning, evaluation of the entertaining and illustrative character of the video, attitude toward physicians and psychologists, importance of IPC, evaluation of psychological treatment support, and knowledge acquisition served as dependent variables. RESULTS: The analysis was based on 140 participants (74 in the mono-, 66 in the inter-professional condition). We found that the inter-professional video was perceived to be more entertaining than the mono-professional video (t (138) = -2.227; P = .028; d = 0.38). The inter-professional video was also considered to be more illustrative (t (138) = -6.269; P < .001; d = 1.06). Moreover, participants improved their attitude toward physicians by watching the video (F (1,138) = 4.860, P < .001, η 2 p = 0.11), but they did not change their attitude toward psychologists (P = .146). Participants who watched the inter-professional video considered IPC to be more important than participants who watched the mono-professional video (t (138) = -7.954; P < .001; d = 1.354). Finally, the inter-professional video led to better performance in the knowledge test (t (138) = -2.285; P = .024; d = 0.04). CONCLUSION: Inter-professional videos showing explicitly the appearance of experts from different professions come along with several advantages. We discuss the implications of their application in educational practice. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The study was pre-registered on the pre-registration platform AsPredicted (aspredicted.org) before we began data collection (registration number: #33143). The pre-registration document can be accessed via the following link: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=gd5hd8.

A Literature Review on the Foundations and Potentials of Digital Teaching Scenarios for Interprofessional Health Care Education.

The health care system is increasingly complex and specialized, but it presents the actors involved with the challenge of working together in interprofessional teams. One way to meet this challenge is through interprofessional training approaches, where representatives of different professions learn together with learners of other professions. This article contributes to the question of how interprofessional teaching in health care education can be designed with a low threshold by using digital media. We focus on learning with digital learning platforms and learning with videos. Based on existing empirical findings, these approaches are discussed in terms of their potential and limitations for interprofessional teaching. In particular, we examine how these approaches influence the core competence domains of interprofessional collaborative practice. Digital collaborative learning platforms are suitable for teaching interprofessional competences, since they enable social and professional exchange among learners of different professions. Videos are suitable for imparting medical declarative and procedural knowledge. Based on these considerations, the use of videos in combination with interaction possibilities is presented as a didactic approach that can combine the aspect of knowledge transfer with the possibility of interprofessional computer-based collaboration.

Acquiring Clinical Knowledge from an Online Video Platform: A Randomized Controlled Experiment on the Relevance of Integrating Anatomical Information and Clinical Practice.

Basic subjects in medical education, such as anatomy, are often taught through teaching formats that do not always sufficiently demonstrate the relevance of this basic information for clinical practice. Accordingly, it is a recent trend in anatomy education to link anatomical information more explicitly to clinical practice. This article presents an online video platform (Tuebingen's Sectio Chirurgica [TSC]) as one means of explicitly integrating preclinical anatomical knowledge and clinical application. The purpose of the study presented here was to examine the effects of videos through which medical students were educated about Anterior Cruciate Ligament reconstruction. A TSC video about this surgical procedure was compared to a video with a traditional lecture providing the identical information. Participants (n = 114) perceived the TSC video to be superior in comprehensibility of the presentation (P = 0.003) and conceivability of the surgical procedure (P = 0.027), and to be more entertaining (P < 0.001). Moreover, participants in the TSC condition acquired more clinical knowledge than in the lecture condition (P = 0.043) but did not differ in their acquisition of anatomical knowledge. Mediation analyses indicated that the effect on the acquisition of clinical knowledge was mediated by comprehensibility, conceivability, and entertainment. These findings are discussed regarding their implications for medical education in terms of contributing to the general trend of linking preclinical anatomical knowledge to clinical application. A discussion about the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are also provided.