IAMSE Publications Committee Journal Review

The International Association of Science Educators (IAMSE) since 2011 publishes articles in the journal Medical Science Educator but previously published articles in the Journal of the International Association of Science Educators (JIAMSE). I wanted to share with you an interesting article that studies whether a human patient simulator improves long-term retention of autonomic facts from one the archived articles from JIAMSE 19 (3): 89-93.

As educators we are always looking for novel approaches to improve long term memory of the material we consider relevant. The paper I will briefly review was published in 2009 by Drs Kasaturi, Heimburger, Nelson, Phero and Millard from the University of Cincinnati Medical School and their work described the use of a human patient simulator for learning Pharmacology concepts and principles.

The study described 26 second year medical students that were provided case-based clinical scenarios with questions to be answered that were related to these cases. The students were to answer the questions prior to the beginning of the study. Half of the students were placed in the computerized human patient simulator group and the rest were the control group. The control group discussed the cases with a trained facilitator in a small group (similar to discussion of cases as was previously done in this course) and the other group worked only with the human patient simulator (SimMan). This patient simulator was programmed to simulate a patient’s cardiopulmonary symptoms and physiological responses to various autonomic pharmaceutical interventions for each of the scenarios covered. Evaluation of their learning of the material was tested using USMLE style questions selected from a test bank used by the University School of Medicine 1, 5, 22 and 33 weeks after studying the information.

The scores on the standardized test administered at various times after being taught the material did not reveal any significant benefit using the human patient simulator approach. Interestingly the authors suggested that a different assessment method for evaluating students’ retention might have uncovered a significant improvement in retention using case scenarios and a patient simulator that were not detected using paper-based examinations.

This review of an archived paper like this one hopefully shows you how IAMSE works to support medical education by  improving the quality of learning for our students.
Remember that you can access this article and many others at www.iamse.org by using the link to Publications-Medical Science Educator and click on Archives.

Dan Schulze
Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Baltimore MD 21201