gms | German Medical Science

Students’ weakness in self-judging performance impacts learning negatively. This is a problem when learning to communicate with patients, as the majority of practice is done in a self-directed fashion in suitable practice settings. Lacking structured feedback there increases the importance of accurate self-judgment. Although research provides ideas on improving self-judgment accuracy, getting a clear picture on what might work and how and why for self-judging communication performance is currently not possible. Thus the purpose of this study is to refine a cognitive model of inferring metacognitive-judgments and translate it into the field of learning to communicate with patients.

Therefore we had students elaborate in writing, how they infer metacognitive judgments (satisfaction-with-performance-judgments) when practicing information gathering for a high stakes practical clinical clerkship entry exam. On this data we use coding and constant comparison to refine and translate the cognitive model of inferring metacognitive judgments into the field of learning to communicate with patients. Adjunct to these qualitative techniques we quantify the narrative material to provide frequencies and descriptive statistics on the model’s categories to review our generalizations and to justify our impressions on the data.

The value of the study lies in broadening our view on how communication training is put in practice when practicing communicating with simulated patients and in advancing our understanding of the self-judgment process thus potentially informing teaching in the communication domain.