Through students' eyes: ethical and professional issues identified by third-year medical students during clerkships.

Background: Education in ethics and professionalism should reflect the realities medical students encounter in the hospital and clinic.

Method: We performed content analyses on Case Observation and Assessments (COAs) written by third-year medical students about ethical and professional issues encountered during their internal medicine and paediatrics clinical clerkships.

Results: A cohort of 141 third-year medical students wrote 272 COAs.

Using systematically observed clinical encounters (SOCEs) to assess medical students' skills in clinical settings.

Introduction: The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is widely used to assess the clinical performance of medical students. However, concerns related to cost, availability, and validity, have led educators to investigate alternatives to the OSCE. Some alternatives involve assessing students while they provide care to patients - the mini-CEX (mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise) and the Long Case are examples.

Trained lay observers can reliably assess medical students' communication skills.

Context: Our project investigated whether trained lay observers can reliably assess the communication skills of medical students by observing their patient encounters in an out-patient clinic.

Methods: During a paediatrics clerkship, trained lay observers (standardised observers [SOs]) assessed the communication skills of Year 3 medical students while the students interviewed patients. These observers accompanied students into examination rooms in an out-patient clinic and completed a 15-item communication skills checklist during the encounter.

Using infant mannequins in objective standardized clinical examinations: are there unintended consequences?

Objective: In objective standardized clinical examination (OSCE) of infants, real infants are generally not used. Instead, the standardized patient portrays a parent who answers a student's questions, and there is no physical examination. One way to assess physical examination skills in these encounters is to have students demonstrate the appropriate examination on a mannequin.

The resident view of professionalism behavior frequency in outstanding and "not outstanding" faculty.

Background: Professionalism assessment has become necessary for all postgraduate training programs because it is now required for accreditation. To validate the novel items we generated to assess professionalism, we tested whether residents' ratings of faculty they judged as outstanding in professionalism would be distinguishable from those they judged as not outstanding.

Methods: Educators from core clinical disciplines generated 20 items assessing professionalism behaviors on a 7-point frequency scale anchored by "always" and "never.

Multi-institutional development and utilization of a computer-assisted learning program for the pediatrics clerkship: the CLIPP Project.

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) holds significant promise for meeting the current challenges of medical education by providing consistent and quality teaching materials regardless of training site. The Computer-assisted Learning in Pediatrics Project (CLIPP) was created over three years (2000-2003) to meet this potential through multi-institutional development of interactive Internet-based patient simulations that comprehensively teach the North American core pediatrics clerkship curriculum. Project development adhered to four objectives: (1) comprehensive coverage of the core curriculum; (2) uniform approach to CAI pedagogy; (3) multi-institutional development by educators; and (4) extensive evaluation by users.