What is the Impact on Participating Students of Real-time Video Monitoring of their Consultation Skills?

Dent, John and Paul Preece (2002). What is the Impact on Participating Students of Real-time Video Monitoring of their Consultation Skills? British Journal of Educational Technology, vol 33, no 3, 349-351.

This article conducted a study to see if seeing oneself and others on video helps junior medical students assess their clinical effectiveness. Though the study is a great idea, the findings are questionable due to validity of the study. To begin with, the sample selected where not current junior medical students. All we know is that they are “postgraduate healthcare workers studying for a master's degree in medical education” without a focus in dentistry. (Dent 349) Thus, this study which is done to determine effectiveness of video monitoring of junior medical students is not done on junior medical students. Also, there were only eleven subjects which I feel is hardly a representative number. Next, the field chosen for this exercise is dentistry. All we know is that none of the subjects have a mastery in dentistry. We do not know if they have been exposed to dentistry before or how else they were chosen.

In this study, the subjects took the history of a simulated patient for five minutes. While they did this, their co-subjects filled out a checklist on his or her performance. We do not know what the checklist is, only that it is based on the SEGUE questionnaire. Then when discussing the results no solid numbers or percentages are given, just vague wording such as majority. Overall, the subjects said they felt the video critiquing was very beneficial to their learning. Although, the quotes from the subjects about the experience are included but with no real substance. In short, I feel the results for this trial are ambiguous and invalid because of the study group.

I chose this article to assess what others have found about peer critique based on videos. Though I would not recommend this article to others, it did make me start thinking about how to use technology for critique. Currently, I am planning on doing an action research question based on peer critique. I am at a school that uses technology and wanted to explore ways of peer critique using technology. After reading this article, I think I might try videoing my students during their presentations to review with them what they did well and what they can improve. Also, I might show videos to the class of past presentations so they can come up with their own checklist on what makes a presentation beautiful.