Simulated patients in audiology education: student reports.

Background: Despite increased attention in recent years to audiology counseling education, students remain concerned about their abilities to interact with patients in challenging situations, such as when breaking difficult news. Simulated patients, or actors trained to portray patients in clinical scenarios, have been used for many years in medical schools to teach and assess students' interpersonal skills, and are just beginning to be used in audiology programs. Although research suggests that medical students value simulated patient experiences, little is known about whether the same is true for audiology students.

Development of an instrument to evaluate audiologic counseling skills.

This study describes the development of an instrument designed to evaluate audiologic counseling skills. In simulated counseling sessions, a trained actor portrayed a parent, and ten graduate audiology students role-played counseling sessions as audiologists informing the "parent" that her infant has a hearing loss. The ten sessions were videotaped, and three raters viewed the taped sessions while evaluating counseling skills with a new evaluation tool, the Audiologic Counseling Evaluation (ACE).