Studying self-efficacy beliefs in medical education

AbstractThe aim is to identify a relevant framework to study self-efficacy in relation to the impact of medical education curricula. In medical education research, self-efficacy beliefs have mostly been studied in relation to their impact on the mastery of communication competencies and clinical skills. Few studies are available – in the medical domain – that centre on a broader range of medical curriculum competencies, the way self-efficacy improves self-regulated learning, how self-efficacy affects motivation, provides study support, how self-efficacy boosts the career development of students and, how self-efficacy influences social and emotional support of students

Managing the complexity of doing it all : an exploratory study on students' experiences when trained stepwise in conducting consultations

Background: At most medical schools the components required to conduct a consultation, medical knowledge, communication, clinical reasoning and physical examination skills, are trained separately. Afterwards, all the knowledge and skills students acquired must be integrated into complete consultations, an art that lies at the heart of the medical profession. Inevitably, students experience conducting consultations as complex and challenging. Literature emphasizes the importance of three didactic course principles: moving from partial tasks to whole task learning, diminishing supervisors' support and gradually increasing students' responsibility. This study explores students' experiences of an integrated consultation course using these three didactic principles to support them in this difficult task. Methods: Six focus groups were conducted with 20 pre-clerkship and 19 clerkship students in total. Discussions were audiotaped, transcribed and analysed by Nvivo using the constant comparative strategy within a thematic analysis. Results: Conducting complete consultations motivated students in their learning process as future physician. Initially, students were very much focused on medical problem solving. Completing the whole task of a consultation obligated them to transfer their theoretical medical knowledge into applicable clinical knowledge on the spot. Furthermore, diminishing the support of a supervisor triggered students to reflect on their own actions but contrasted with their increased appreciation of critical feedback. Increasing students' responsibility stimulated their active learning but made some students feel overloaded. These students were anxious to miss patient information or not being able to take the right decisions or to answer patients' questions, which sometimes resulted in evasive coping techniques, such as talking faster to prevent the patient asking questions. Conclusion: The complex task of conducting complete consultations should be implemented early within medical curricula because students need time to organize their medical knowledge into applicable clinical knowledge. An integrated consultation course should comprise a step-by-step teaching strategy with a variety of supervisors' feedback modi, adapted to students' competence. Finally, students should be guided in formulating achievable standards to prevent them from feeling overloaded in practicing complete consultations with simulated or real patients

Factors confounding the assessment of reflection: a critical review

BACKGROUND: Reflection on experience is an increasingly critical part of professional development and lifelong learning. There is, however, continuing uncertainty about how best to put principle into practice, particularly as regards assessment. This article explores those uncertainties in order to find practical ways of assessing reflection. DISCUSSION: We critically review four problems: 1. Inconsistent definitions of reflection; 2. Lack of standards to determine (in)adequate reflection; 3. Factors that complicate assessment; 4. Internal and external contextual factors affecting the assessment of reflection. SUMMARY: To address the problem of inconsistency, we identified processes that were common to a number of widely quoted theories and synthesised a model, which yielded six indicators that could be used in assessment instruments. We arrived at the conclusion that, until further progress has been made in defining standards, assessment must depend on developing and communicating local consensus between stakeholders (students, practitioners, teachers, supervisors, curriculum developers) about what is expected in exercises and formal tests. Major factors that complicate assessment are the subjective nature of reflection's content and the dependency on descriptions by persons being assessed about their reflection process, without any objective means of verification. To counter these validity threats, we suggest that assessment should focus on generic process skills rather than the subjective content of reflection and where possible to consider objective information about the triggering situation to verify described reflections. Finally, internal and external contextual factors such as motivation, instruction, character of assessment (formative or summative) and the ability of individual learning environments to stimulate reflection should be considered

Impact of three alternative consultation training formats on self-efficacy and consultation skills of medical students

Background: Conducting a consultation is a core competence of medical professionals. Consultation training of medical students centers on clinical, communication, reasoning and reflection skills. The training incorporates practice with a standardized simulated patient and supervising physician, to prepare for real patient encounters. To meet the request for more training, while dealing with an increasing student population and limited staff availability, alternative formats of consultation training were developed and evaluated. Aim: To investigate the impact of three consultation training formats on students' self-efficacy beliefs and their consultation skills acquisition. The three formats comprised (1) traditional training with supervising physician, (2) autonomous training with feedback from simulated patients and peers, without direct supervision and (3) online training based on video fragments and answering guiding questions. Methods: A quasi-experimental pre/posttest study was set up, with random assignment of students to a training condition. The differential impact was tested on two dependent measures: self-efficacy and consultation performance. Self-efficacy was tested with a nine-item scale and the cognitive component of consultation performance was tested on the base of responses to a standardized video case. Results: The autonomous training has a significant positive effect on students' self-efficacy (p = 0.016). The traditional training and the online training did only positively influence the cognitive component of the consultation competence (p < 0.001 and p = 0.003). Conclusions: Each consultation training contributes to the learning process in a different way. In order to achieve optimum learning effects, medical educators should be aware of the particular impact of specific trainings on the cognitive and motivational side of skills and pursue a balanced mixture of instructional formats