Synopsis
This research product comes by way of the Third Military
Medical University in Chongqing, China. The purpose of the study was to
evaluate a program that was designed to test the effectiveness of a role-playing
based teaching method for undergrad medical students going into medical genetics
fields. The study used 2326 med students who already had a background in medicine
from previous years of instruction. As stated, this study was an attempt to
evaluate how well role-playing worked in these students’ practice of, in
particular, genetic counseling. To do this, the students were tested on 42 medical
genetics components such as mitosis, dominance, traits, and diseases before the
start of the test to establish a baseline.
The program consisted of studying the theoretical knowledge
of medical genetics, then preparing the case scenarios, and playing out the
roles in the classrooms. The testing portion made use of a tiered system of new
lectures, clinical doctors, and expert teachers to integrate the role-playing
methodology. From there, the students devoted as much as 80% of class time to
researching the conditions of their illness they were tasked to understand. These
lead to strong results. In fact, during the actual exercise, the students adapted
their rolls to portray characters with lower education levels to prompt the
doctors to explain their conditions in simplified terms, which required a
greater understanding of the condition itself and work on professional
communication skills.
At the conclusion of the experiment, the students were
re-tested in the 42 key fields and the results were compared to the pretests.
The results showed increases to the students’ knowledge of genetic medicine. The
researcher attributed the increase in subject mastery directly to the
exercises. The researchers acknowledge that the study had some limits. First,
the student body at the facility was far too great for everyone to have a proper
chance as a patient and as a doctor. Also, feedback was limited slightly due to
the aforementioned size. In addition, there were several variables such as
religion and tradition, insurance, and other interpretations the researchers
did not take into account. Ultimately, the purpose of the program was to look
at altering how the topic of medicine is taught to students.
Critique
First, it is very interesting to read such a study from an
Eastern medical body. The study followed a logical progression of start, test,
and end (logical at least for the layperson). The findings were expected. The reason
I went with this study was due to it being far removed from the extensive Western
body of knowledge on the topic of role-playing’s effects on professional abilities.
Even so, they found that role-playing did aid in participants ability to become
more effective in their field. While not explicitly translating to forecasting
accuracy, it does carry other connotations. Primarily, role-playing helped the
students to understand the counseling process better and make them better counselors
due to not only seeing things from the doctor’s view, but from the patient’s
view as well. This provided greater insight into the process that, through
testing, showed a greater mastery of the course. The metrics surrounding the
results however are not quite as strong as they could be. If there were a way
to make the study more robust, it would possible be via a longitudinal study of
how the students go on to assist the medical field. Nevertheless, for the time
being, the narrative is encouraging.
It may be a leap, but it’s a fairly easy leap to say that
role-playing could indeed make any professional a better professional. What
constitutes a better professional is certainly left to the field in question.
However, for the intelligence analyst, being able to have a deeper and richer
understanding of a situation or the actors therein would offer them a chance to
shake cognitive biases and offer a better forecast of likely events.
Source
Xu, X., Wang, Y., Wang, Y., Song, M., Xiao, W., & Bai, Y. (2016). Role-playing is an effective instructional strategy for genetic counseling training: an investigation and comparative study. BMC Medical Education, 16, 235. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0756-4
Posts
Interesting article, Ruark. Was it the students role-playing the position of doctor, or was it an actual professional in the study? If it was a student playing the role of doctor, then I think there is a possibility of this study increasing forecasting accuracy in those individuals. After all, doctors deal with uncertainty all the time when they try to diagnose someone.
ReplyDeleteIf I read things correctly, it was the students who were playing the roll of both doctor and patient with the professionals monitoring and guiding the exercise. While I am not sure if it does increase forecasting accuracy per se, it does give the person a greater command of their field and perhaps does increase some accuracy, by proxy at the very least.
DeleteI think from my reading the students played both sides doctor and patient. The question I have is how long did each student have to study their particular area to master? Hours? Days? Weeks? I realize it mentions 80% of the time devoted to studying material, I'm just curious how long did they get. For pending on the time spent studying it could have implications on validity and reliability of the results.
ReplyDeleteAn actual amount of time? No number exists, and that is kind of expected. The study did not take into account past experiences or how the student managed their time. They are students, they do have a lot of material to cover, and they only have a finite amount of time to do the coursework in. To also add a rejoinder from your comment on Aubrey's post, I don't think there is a set time someone has to have in order to do a role playing exercise. They most certainly do need time, but as to how much exactly is more a heuristic than a known. If anything, and to borrow from an oft quoted line, not one minute more or less than necessity.
DeleteRuark,
ReplyDeleteI liked your article from China. I believe it is interesting to get a non-Western perspective when looking into the viability of a methodology. Yours is the first review I've read apart from my own but I can already see a trend in that whoever participates in these role-playing experiments seems to come out with a greater understanding of the topic at hand. However as you said, this doesn't translate directly into an increased ability to predict the actions of others. It seems to be more useful in predicting how the participants themselves will act in the future.
Indeed. I believe a longitudinal study that tracks failures to successes would satisfy that, somewhat. What I am starting to glen from these is that much of the success falls in how well the methods and modifiers are utilized.
DeleteRuark,
ReplyDeleteThis article definitely puts a strong argument for Role Playing in multiple fields if the results are significant. Did the researchers use some normalization in order to test if the increased understanding was statistically significant?
It does make the case for role playing. To answer your question, they did graphs and such that stated that there was statistical significance in the study, but I somewhat glossed over that in favor of the narratives. Testing the efficacy of something like role playing reads as something of a crap shot.
Delete