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Fostering professional communication skills of future physicians and teachers: effects of e-learning with video cases and role-play

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Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of three different versions of a training programme on physician–patient and teacher–parent conversations for medical students and student teachers. The research questions concerned the differential effects of e-learning featuring contrastive video cases, role-play including video feedback and their combination. The training effects were tested to determine whether they were similar across both professional domains. In a randomised controlled trial (N = 168), three training conditions were prepared using a wait-list control group. The assessment of communication competence was based on videotaped communications between the participants and simulated patients/parents (i.e., trained actors). The results of planned contrast analyses corroborated the study expectations: first, a strong overall treatment effect was observed. Second, the combined condition was more effective than e-learning and role-play alone when controlling for prior knowledge and cognitive ability. Third, e-learning proved more effective than role-play. Exploring interaction effects indicated that student teachers benefited more from the training than medical students.

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Notes

  1. Of course, not every parent–teacher/physician–patient conversation is problem-focused. However, such situations were in the focus of our training programme.

  2. The design could also be framed as being 2 × 2 × 2 factorial, which implies an identical set of experimental conditions. Because our research questions concerned focused comparisons, the analytic differences between 4 × 2 and 2 × 2 × 2 designs are of no consequence for this study. Therefore, the preferred framing was the simpler 4 × 2 design.

  3. This is following the German school grade logic, which is assumed to assist the raters.

  4. Though a pre-test was not required for securing the internal validity of the treatment effects because of the randomised assignment (Shadish et al. 2002), it would have been advantageous for the domain comparison. However, because the ASP/P assessment takes about 2 h (including waiting times) and the participants already had long training days, a pre-test with the ASP/P would have been impractical. Additionally, a pre-test might have induced testing effects; to control these would have required doubling the experimental conditions (Shadish et al. 2002). Doing so was beyond the scope of the present study.

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Acknowledgments

This programme was developed in the context of Project ProfKom - Professionalization of future physicians and teachers in the area of communication competence, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant Code 01PH08015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TUM School of Education, TU München, Arcisstr. 21, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Martin Gartmeier, Johannes Bauer, Anne Wiesbeck & Manfred Prenzel

  2. Lehrstuhl für Didaktik und Ausbildungsforschung in der Medizin, LMU München, Ziemssenstr. 1, 80336, Munich, Germany

    Martin R. Fischer & Claudia Kiessling

  3. Zentrum für Medizindidaktik, CAU Kiel, Feldstraße 10-12, 24105, Kiel, Germany

    Tobias Hoppe-Seyler, Gudrun Karsten & Grit E. Möller

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  1. Martin Gartmeier
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Correspondence to Martin Gartmeier.

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Gartmeier, M., Bauer, J., Fischer, M.R. et al. Fostering professional communication skills of future physicians and teachers: effects of e-learning with video cases and role-play. Instr Sci 43, 443–462 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-014-9341-6

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