Artikel
Evaluation of curricular integration of virtual patients: Development of a student questionnaire within the electronic virtual patient (eVIP) project
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Veröffentlicht: | 5. Mai 2009 |
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Question: The use of virtual patients in medical education is rapidly increasing. The curricular integration of the e-learning modules is essential for their success. Numerous articles report on the use of virtual patients in different educational scenarios around the globe. To date, however, we are not aware of any published standardized evaluation instruments to evaluate the curricular integration of virtual patients. This project addresses the question of how to design a valid, standardized evaluation instrument for curricular integration of virtual patients to allow comparison and scientific analysis of different curricular integration scenarios. This project is anchored in the electronic Virtual Patient project (eViP, http://www.virtualpatients.eu), which is co-funded by the European Union.
Methods: In a literature review, valuable frameworks for designing a student questionnaire concerning the curricular integration of virtual patients were found and incorporated into our tool. By introducing the general term “corresponding teaching event” for teaching activities which go along with virtual patients, our questionnaire can be employed for all different kinds of educational scenarios using virtual patients. The questionnaire has been reviewed by the electronic Virtual Patient project partners, translated into 6 languages, pilot tested on target groups, and repeatedly revised. A preliminary study among fifth year medical students (n=50) was conducted, to evaluate the usefulness of the questionnaire for evaluation of the curricular integration of virtual patients into the Paediatrics Course at Heidelberg Medical School.
Results: This project created a multi-lingual student questionnaire to evaluate the curricular integration of virtual patients, and is adjustable to all educational scenarios employing virtual patients. The final instrument consists of 20 questions, clustered in the following 5 main categories: teaching presence, cognitive presence, social presence, learning effect, and overall judgement. In a preliminary study at Heidelberg Medical School the questionnaire proved to be very helpful in identifying strengths and weaknesses within our curricular integration of virtual patients.
Conclusion: A multi-lingual student questionnaire which allows analysis and comparison of virtual patient curricular integration scenarios is now available. We encourage medical educators around the globe to implement the tool and we would appreciate their feedback.