The effectiveness of shared clinical teaching in nursing

Aim: Clinical learning is a critical component of a nursing curriculum.Student satisfaction in clinical environment is crucial to foster a positive learning experience.Faculty shortages have made clinical teaching more challenging;as such,alternate models of clinical teaching must be explored by nursing programs.The purpose of this study was to measure the perception of student satisfaction in regard tothe effectiveness of shared clinical teaching in nursing.Methods: Utilizing Chan's Clinical Learning Environment Inventory (CLEI),this quantitative comparative study examined nursing students' preferred and actual clinical learning environment.The CLEI contains 42 questions in six subscales: Individualization,Innovation,Involvement,Personalization,Task Orientation,and Satisfaction in both the actual and preferred clinical learning environment.The sample consisted of 202 nursing students in two groups: the first group had 91 students who experienced shared clinical teaching with two faculty,whereas the second group had 111 students who experienced the traditional,single faculty model.The results were analyzed using independent sample T-tests.Results: The preferred learning environment was rated highest in all six subscales.Scores of the Satisfaction subscale and the Innovation subscale for Actual Learning Environment,and the score of the Innovation subscale for Preferred Learning Environment of students experiencing shared clinical teaching with two faculty were higher than the scores of students experiencing traditional,single faculty model,with statistically significance (P< 0.05).Conclusion: The results indicated students preferred the shared clinical teaching model with two faculty over the single faculty model.Nursing programs can utilize this model and apply these results to develop and maintain quality clinical teaching.

An iterative approach to enhance the clinical learning experience in Macao nursing education

Objective: The aim of this study was to reduce or eliminate the stressors to enhance nursing students' clinical learning experience through implementation of an iterative approach that developed a personalised response to student stress.Methods: A prospective cohort research design was applied to collect data from a sample of undergraduate nursing students across the four study years.An iterative approach was employed to improve students' learning experience and the Stressors in Nursing Students Scale-Chinese Version (SINS-CN) was used to measure student stress.Key problems encountered by students were identified,refined and the responding solutions were worked out and implemented among this group of students through their first year to fourth year.Results: The overall SINS-CN mean score (2.17-2.82) of students was declined to a moderate level.Conclusions: Having implemented iterative approach to address factors that led to stressful environments encountered by the nursing students,the overall stress score and each sub-dimension score decreased significantly.Therefore,it is recommended that this approach could be adopted by other colleagues in the nursing arena around the world.

Flipped classroom approach to ophthalmology clerkship courses for Chinese students of eight-year program

Background:The“flipped classroom”is a learner-centered approach that centers on delivering videos,podcasts or slide-based material to learners prior to a lecture or class session.The class session is then dedicated to discussion,analysis,and problem-solving activities.The aim of this study was to investigate whether the flipped classroom could be adapted to medical(ophthalmology)students learning about ocular trauma and to assess the impact of the flipped classroom on those students’performance and attitudes.Methods:Questionnaires(using a 4-point scale)were distributed to 93 fifth-year medical students at Sun Yat-sen University,and the data showed that the majority of students preferred the flipped classroom approach to the traditional lecture method.Results:The results of pre-and post-test scores were 14.35±3.404 and 20.37±4.356,which showed a significant improvement in students’performance after the flipped classroom was introduced(P<0.05).Conclusions:Student response to the flipped classroom strategy was largely positive,indicating that the strategy received a high level of approval in an ophthalmology clerkship course taken by medical students in China.

Student self-assessment versus preceptor assessment at the midpoint of a family medicine clerkship

Objective:To study how student self-assessment compared with the faculty’s assessment on our family medicine clerkship and to explore the effect of demographic factors on the rat-ings.Methods:Students and their faculty preceptors assessed the students’achievement of clerk-ship objectives at mid clerkship.We performed Mann-Whitney U tests to compare student ratings and faculty ratings for each clerkship objective.We performed linear regression analyses to in-vestigate the effect of medical school year and student sex on student ratings and the effect of sex concordance or sex difference of the faculty-student pair on faculty ratings.Results:Two hundred one students completed the family medicine clerkship between July 2015 and June 2016.Faculty ratings were higher than student ratings for all 12 clerkship objec-tives(P<0.05 for all comparisons).Third-year students rated themselves higher than second-year students for nine of the clerkship objectives.There was no difference in student ratings between female students and male students and no difference in faculty ratings whether there was a sex-concordant or a sex-different preceptor-student pair.Discussion:Our findings add to the knowledge of the mid-clerkship feedback process offered by different clerkships.Further study is needed to investigate how students use this feedback to improve for the remainder of the clerkship.

Student self-assessment of strengths and needed improvements during a family medicine clerkship

Objective:There are few reports on how students self-assess their performance on a family medicine clerkship.We studied what students perceived as their strengths and areas of needed improvement at the mid-point in our family medicine clerkship.Methods:We introduced a form for family medicine clerkship students to self-assess their strengths and areas of needed improvements using the clerkship objectives as a standard.We cal-culated the frequency in which each clerkship objective was reported as a strength or an area of needed improvement.For students’open-ended comments,two reviewers independently organ-ized students’comments into themes,then negotiated any initial differences into a set of themes that incorporated both the reviewers’findings.We performed c2 tests to determine any significant differences in the frequency of responses between male and female students.Results:During the study period(July 2012 to June 2014),372 students submitted com-pleted self-assessment forms.The most frequently reported strengths were professional objectives(48.9%)and interpersonal communication objectives(43.0%)The most frequently reported areas of needed improvement were the ability to explain key characteristics of commonly used medica-tions(29.3%)and the ability to develop a management plan(28.5%).There were no significant differences in the frequency of responses between male and female students.Conclusion:We now have a better understanding of students’perceived strengths and areas of needed improvement in our family medicine clerkship.We have shared this information with our community faculty preceptors so that they will be better prepared to work with our students.Family medicine clerkship preceptors at other institutions may also find these results useful.

The role of the teaching practice in undergraduate medical education: A perspective from the United States of America

This article describes and reflects on the role of teaching practices in undergraduate medical education on the basis of teaching experience in the United States of America.China in particular,but also other family medicine-emerging countries,continues to embark on a path of creating and embracing a family medicine-centric system.The purpose of this article is to provide a US perspective on teaching priorities and strategies for medical students,and how these fit into a larger structure of the family medicine clinical clerkship.We emphasize knowledge,clinical skills,clinical behaviors,and strategies for succeeding as a preceptor.We introduce key aspects of the University of Michigan family medicine clerkship and the highly effective structure provided by the leadership of the course directors.This organizational structure provides a framework for implementing the family medicine clerkship for teaching medical students.As China and other family medicine-emerging countries increasingly embrace the discipline,we hope these ideas will provide a meaningful reference.