Journal of Medical Education
Volume:4 Issue: 1, Feb 2002

Training teachers through educational programs are necessmy for fulfilling health science teaching competencies. Short-term workshop has variously reported as an influential training program.

The purpose was to determine the effects of educational workshops on teaching pe1jormance of medical teachers.

A 29-item questionnaire containing demographic information, and attitude, changes of interest, educational pe!formance and ability, and also participants' comments and suggestions were administered after the three educational workshops.

Results highlight effects 011 changing the behavior mostly in increasing the teaching performance. They also indicate more improvement of younger faculty who had recently started their educational activities.

Further evaluations are needed to determine all the aspects of teaching performance for having most effectual educational workshops.

Fulfilling the learners' "real needs" will improve medical education. There are subjects that are necessary for any clinical residents not considering their field of specialty. Among the subjects ten seems to be the most important: research methodology and data analysis, computer-based programs, medical recording, cardiopulmonary and cerebral resuscitation, clinical teaching programs, communication skills, clinical ethics, laboratory examinations, reporting special"diseases and death certification, and prescription.

This cross-sectional study assessed educational needs of clinical residents for ten educational subjects.

A questionnaire prepared by board faculty members consisted of 10 close-ended questions, and one open ended question was distributed among 1307 residents from 22 clinical disciplines, who registered for preboard or promotion exam in June 2000.

Among the subjects three were the most needed: computer-based programs 149 (60%), data collecting system606 (49%), and clinical ethics 643 (46%). The prescription standard was the least required 177(13%). Conclusion Complementary training courses on these subjects can be an answer to the clinical residents needs.

Video-based instruction has been stated as an effective method of teaching and its potentials have encouraged instructors and learners to opt this method.

The current study has compared the students' cognitive learning in the two approaches oflecture-based and video-based teaching.

This quasi-experimental study was conducted on 88 senior nursing students who were randomly assigned into two groups based on their average score. One group attended a lecture accompanied by slides and the other viewed a video presentation.

With video presentation, the students achieved better results compared to the lecture method. The students were mostly satisfied with video instruction (75.6%) and they were willing to continue with this method (66.7%). Conclusion Video-based instruction is an effective method for improving students' cognitive learning.Key words: video-based instruction, students cognitive learning

 Improvement of medical education is necessmy for meeting health care demands. Participation of private practice physicians in ambulatory care training is an effective method for enhancing medical students' skills. Purpose This study was undertaken to detennine clinical professors' views about participation of physicians with private office in ambulatory care training.

Participants composed of 162 Shiraz Medical University faculty members from 12 disciplines. A questionnaire requesting faculty members' views on different aspects of ambulat01y care teaching and interaction of community-based organizations was distributed.

  Of 120 (74.1%) respondents, 64 (54.2%) believed that clinical settings of medical university are appropriate for ambulatory care training. Private practice physicians believed more than academic physicians without private office that private offices have wider range of patients, more common cases, and better follow up chance; and is also a better setting for learning ambulatory care compared with medical university  clinical centers. Overall, 32 (29.1%) respondent’s fozmd the participation of physicians with private practice on medical education positive.
 

Background Medical: 

education curriculum improvements can be achieved bye valuating students performance. Medical students have to pass two undergraduate comprehensive examinations, basic science and preinternship, in fran.Purpose To measure validity of the students' mean score in comprehensive basic science exam (CBS£) for predicting their pe1jormance in later curriculum phases.

This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 95 (38 women and 55 men) Guilan medical university students. Their admission to the university was 81% by regional quota and 12% by shaheed and other organizations' share. They first enrolled in 1994 and were able to pass CBS£ at first try. Data on gender, regional quota, and average grades of CBS£, PC, and CPIE were collected by a questionnaire. The calculations were done by SPSS package.

The correlation coefficient between CBS£ and CPIE mean scores (0.65) was higher than correlation coefficient between CBS£ and PC mean scores (0.49). The predictive validity of CBS£ average grade was significant for students' perfonnance in CPJE,· however, the predictive validity ofCBSE mean scores for students I pe1jormance in PC was lower.

he students' mean score in CBS£ can be a good denominator for their further admission. We recommend further research to assess the predictive validity for each one of the basic courses.

The comprehension processes are often inferred or explored indirectly through the assessment of the performance of the students on certain tasks. Comprehension is typically measured by the techniques in which the test-taker reads a short text and then selects the correct answers in multiple choice questions, true/false and yes/no tasks or matching activities.

A new approach to the analysis of recall protocols, written by medical students, is devised which is mainly based on the performance analysis.

Three texts have been selected out of the pool of 20 texts based on the medical students' level of familiarity content. Care was taken to select texts of the same level of readability. The language proficiency of the students was measured by English Language Battery Test (ELBA test). The students read the texts and wrote recall in their mother tongue. Half the students did the ELBA test before reading the texts and writing the recalls and the other half did the task in reverse sequence. The recall analysis, so that the emphasis is on students' performance at two levels: identification and interpretation processes.

Identification processes and interpretation processes are interacting efficiently when a content familiar text is used. The unfamiliar text, when read by a student with prior language proficiency, is not efficiently comprehended. However, when familiar text is read by the same student, he can compensate his poor language proficiency by resorting to his prior knowledge.

Interaction between different knowledge sources are better demonstrated when recall is used as the technique for measuring reading comprehension.

Today, through out the world, medical education has two critical needs: need for structural reform and innovative plans and then need for social accountability in terms of educational program quality and its effectiveness. Educational assessment and accreditation could be considered as operational (executive) strategy to meet both needs. Of outmost important as the first toward educational assessment and accreditation is the task of specifying standards for medical education both in terms of the institution and the educational program of the institution. Since these standards constitute a new framework against which the medical institutes can measure themselves.Here, in this article we have briefly reviewed the process of developing these standards by AMFEM (in Mexico) and by WFME at an international level. We have tried to underlie two critical features common in both processes. First, the importance levels to defining the physicians' role in terms of what the society or better say, the health care system (as the representative of social health requirement) expects from a good physician. Second, the thoughtful attempt to involve as many experts as possible in the process of developing the standards and providing opportunities to discuss the result of each stage of the specifying standard process.