Virtual patient (VP) simulations can offer educational benefits in healthcare disciplines by supplementing traditional training approaches and enabling the acquisition of clinically relevant skills and knowledge. Although the existing body of literature covers VP usage in healthcare professions such as medicine and nursing, there are no current…

The development of clinical judgment is an important topic in nursing education, and various teaching strategies have been proposed to improve this skill among nursing students and new graduate nurses. However, the effectiveness of these strategies is not well-researched. One promising approach is using higher-order questions to guide and develop…

Purpose: Peer-assisted learning (PAL) in formative objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is an approach used to evaluate the students' clinical competence. This study aims to determine the PAL effectiveness in the formative OSCE in improving clinical competencies and the students' perception and satisfaction of PAL.…

Clinical reasoning ability is an important competence for a clinician to have. Undergraduate study is a crucial period to strengthen medical students' clinical reasoning skills. The aim of this study was to explore an effective method for guiding students to improve clinical reasoning skills via a step-by-step presentation of case information. The…

Purpose: Cognitive load theory (CLT) is receiving increased recognition in medical education and it was cited as an important theoretical framework for simulation-based medical education. Simulated learning environments can place a high demand on the cognitive resources of the learners, hence, we aimed to design an instructional framework to…

Debriefing offers an opportunity to ensure that students can master critical components of nursing that they might not otherwise learn and to remove epistemological roadblocks to knowledge acquisition. Within this study, Debriefing for Meaningful Learning (DML), a theoretically-derived, evidence based and structured debriefing method, was used to…

Context: Athletic training programs blend didactic experiences with clinical practice opportunities with varied patient populations. Traditionally, clinical education relies heavily on the preceptor to supervise, instruct, and mentor the professional athletic training student (P-ATS) during clinical education. Objective: To describe a…

A broad foundation of behavioural (Hayes et al. in "Exp Brain Res" 204(2): 199-206, 2010) and neurophysiological (Kohler et al. in "Science" 297(5582): 846-848, 2002) evidence has revealed that the acquisition of psychomotor skills, including those germane to clinical practice (Domuracki et al. in "Med Educ" 49(2):…

Physical therapy is a branch of healthcare that has advanced from an ancillary support role to an autonomous doctoral level profession in only two decades. Enrollment in physical therapy programs is increasing while resources and program length remain limited, leaving academic leaders challenged to identify instructional methods to manage…

Problem-based Learning (PBL) is an alternate method of instruction that incorporates basic elements of cognitive learning theory. Colleges of pharmacy use PBL to aid anticipated learning outcomes and practice competencies for pharmacy student. The purpose of this study were to implement and evaluate a model of small group PBL for 5th year pharmacy…

General practitioners are responsible for the management of an increasing number of patients with neurological illness, and thus a solid education in neurosciences is a necessary component of their training. This study examines the effects of an intensive clinical neuroanatomy course on twenty general practice residents' perceptions, attitudes,…

The United States is currently facing a crisis in health care and health professions education. Various studies (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America 2000; 2001; General Accounting Office, 2001) have documented astonishing death rates from medical errors as well as nursing and physician shortages. Thus it is obvious that the traditional…

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is methodology for eliciting knowledge from subject matter experts. CTA has been used to capture the cognitive processes, decision-making, and judgments that underlie expert behaviors. A review of the literature revealed that CTA has not yet been used to capture the knowledge required to perform ultrasound guided…

Clinical education provides the nursing student opportunities to learn the practice of nursing. In the clinical setting, the nursing student applies classroom knowledge to the real patient care situation. The clinical instructor facilitates this important process by assisting students to integrate knowledge into their practice, improve their…

Student success is dependent on effective instruction. Yet, effective teaching is difficult to define and described differently by students, faculty, and administrators. Nursing and dental hygiene education programs require faculty to teach in both classroom and clinical environments. However, accreditation agencies for these programs mandate…