Towards a pedagogy for noticing: Piloting a novel intervention for health professions students.

Teaching students to 'notice' what is happening around them, to be more attuned to what is going on within themselves, and nurturing self-inquiry into one's practice is desirable yet difficult to achieve. We sought to teach the metacognitive skill of 'noticing' to pre-registration health professions students in the context of interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). A three-part curriculum was designed: an e-module focused on 'noticing' in IPCP; a team-based workplace learning observation and interprofessional debrief; and a written reflective assignment. We found that students concentrated on the disciplinary content of IPCP in the assignments, which 'overshadowed' the metacognitive content. We learned that: we had underestimated the challenges of retrofitting new content into existing curricula; that we had not paid enough attention to students' perceptions about what they want to learn; and working with a large and diverse group of educators requires adequate preparation. The next iteration of this program will improve the constructive alignment between learning outcomes and assessments and provide better support for educators. In the future we will temper decisions to act quickly to implement curricular innovations. More broadly, we suggest that educational design that seeks to take account of qualitatively different but intersecting knowledge domains, such as IPCP and 'noticing', is worthy of further study.

Perceived educational impact of the medical student long case: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: The long case is a traditional method of clinical assessment which has fallen out of favour in certain contexts, primarily due to psychometric concerns. This study explored the long case's educational impact, an aspect which has been neglected in previous research. METHODS: Three focus groups of medical students (20 in total) and semi-structured interviews of six examiners were conducted. Cook and Lineberry's framework for exploring educational impact was used as a sensitising tool during thematic analysis of the data. RESULTS: Participants described the long case and its scoring as having influence on student learning. Engaging in the activity of a long case had an essential role in fostering students' clinical skills and served as a powerful driving force for them to spend time with patients. The long case was seen as authentic, and the only assessment to promote a holistic approach to patients. Students had concerns about inter-case variability, but there was general consensus that the long case was valuable, with allocation of marks being an important motivator for students. CONCLUSIONS: This study offers a unique focus on the traditional long case's educational consequences; the extent of its positive impact would support its place within a program of assessment.

Introduction of a near peer surgical tutor program for final year medical students.

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The Light Time-Use Diary and preschool activity patterns: exploratory study.

AIM: To conduct an exploratory study of time-use patterns in Australian 5-year-old children, and to pilot the novel Children's Light Time-Use Diary as a potential tool for investigating relationships between children's time-use and weight status. METHODS: Subjects for the present cross-sectional study were drawn from an established longitudinal cohort and included eighty-four 5-year-old Australian children (36 males) originally recruited as infants in three local government areas of Melbourne. Children were weighed and measured, and body mass index (BMI; kg/m(2)) calculated. Over three to four complete 24-hour periods, parents completed the Children's Light Time-Use Diary to record their child's activities in 15-minute blocks and details about the context in which the activities took place, selecting from a list of predetermined options. RESULTS: The children studied were largely sedentary, with television viewing the most time-consuming activity outside sleep. Only 49% of children spent any time walking for transport or pleasure. Children spent a median of 71% of their time in activities that were likely to be physically active when outdoors, compared with 3% when indoors, but averaged only 110 minutes/day outdoors (excluding passive transport). The 11 overweight/obese children watched significantly more television than non-overweight children. CONCLUSION: The Children's Light Time-Use Diary appears to be a practical and informative tool, which may complement accelerometry as a tool relevant to future studies of the determinants of child overweight/obesity. Further validation studies and larger research trials seem warranted.