Franz Ruderich | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

A modified electronic key feature examination for undergraduate medical students: validation threats and opportunities.

The purpose of our study was the development and validation of a modified electronic key feature exam of clinical decision-making skills for undergraduate medical students. Therefore, the reliability of the test (15 items), the item difficulty level, the item-total correlations and correlations to other measures of knowledge (40 item MC-test and 580 items of German MC-National Licensing Exam, Part II) were calculated. Based on the guidelines provided by the Medical Council of Canada, a modified electronic key feature exam for internal medicine consisting of 15 key features (KFs) was developed for fifth year German medical students. Long menu (LM) and short menu (SM) question formats were used. Acceptance was assessed through a questionnaire. Thirty-seven students from four medical schools voluntarily participated in the study. The reliability of the key feature exam was 0.65 (Cronbach's alpha). The items' difficulty level scores were between 0.3 and 0.8 and the item-total correlations between 0.0 and 0.4. Correlations between the results of the KF exam and the other measures of knowledge were intermediate (r between 0.44 and 0.47) as well as the learners' level of acceptance. The modified electronic KF examination is a feasible and reliable evaluation tool that may be implemented for the assessment of clinical undergraduate training.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

CAMPUS--a flexible, interactive system for web-based, problem-based learning in health care.

Care for patients is the best way to learn medicine and medical methods and skills. But the availability of real patients for learners is limited. Often the appropriate patient is missed or he can not be demonstrated to all students because of practical or ethical problems. A possible solution is the presentation of a clinical problem by a virtual patient using a simulative computer program. But such an approach means often a lot of work for the author of the case. We developed a flexible and realistic system, CAMPUS (www.medicase.de), which supports the case authors with appropriate vocabularies and a comfortable authoring tool. There are different kinds of case presentations to the users in accordance to the level of professionalism of the user and the scenario the program is used in. An evaluation within an internship has shown, that such pro-grams are judged as useful by medical students. But further studies are necessary to examine if the program will be used for the self-study and to develop further kinds of using scenarios within problem-based curricula.

Computer Simulation↗