Short CommunicationMedical students’ views and experiences of methods of teaching and learning communication skills
Introduction
Aspegren [1] reviewed 83 medium- and high-quality studies evaluating the effectiveness of communication skills training programmes. Twenty-five randomised studies demonstrated that medical students could and do learn different communication skills by training. The review also demonstrated that instructional methods such as lectures were ineffective in the teaching of communication skills in comparison with experiential methods like videotaped interviews with simulated patients and feedback from the teacher. Although many studies have evaluated the effectiveness of teaching and learning methods, there is a lack of research that explores in depth undergraduate medical students’ views and experiences of such methods. This short communication aims to address this gap in the research literature.
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Methods
After receiving ethical approval, five focus group discussions were convened with 32 students, with representatives from each of the 5 years of the medical degree, at the University of Nottingham in the academic session 2000–2001. All of the discussions were audiotaped and transcribed in full and the transcripts were theme analysed independently by two analysts. This allowed the determination of inter-rater reliability, and any differences were negotiated. The level of agreement between the two
Results
Participants’ ages ranged from 19 to 27 years (median=20, inter-quartile range=19.25–22.0). The majority were white (n=28, 87.5%), female (n=22, 68.8%) and from socio-economic status I and II (n=31, 96.9%). All spoke English as their first language. Seven (21.9%) participants were first-year students, 7 (21.9%) were second-year students, 10 (31.3%) third-year students, 5 (15.6%) fourth-year students and 3 (9.4%) were fifth-year students.
Two themes relating to teaching and learning methods
Discussion and conclusion
This study has begun to explore medical students’ views and experiences of methods of teaching and learning communication skills. Students have mixed views about instructional methods of learning communication skills such as lectures. Some students felt that lecture methods were inappropriate because they involved the passive acquisition of information rather than the active learning of skills. In his review of the literature, Aspegren [1] concluded that instructional methods like lectures were
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by a grant awarded to the first author by the Teaching Enhancement Office at the University of Nottingham (Ref. 99TL/179). We would like to thank all of the students who participated in this study.
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