Communication skills training and the conceptual structure of empathy among medical students.

Introduction: Medical and healthcare professionals' empathy for patients is crucially important for patient care. Some studies have suggested that a significant decline in empathy occurs during clinical training years in medical school as documented by self-assessed empathy scales. Moreover, a recent study provided qualitative evidence that communication skills training in an examination context, such as in an objective structured clinical examination, might stimulate perspective taking but inhibit the development of compassionate care.

The bridge between design and analysis.

The overall purpose of the 'Statistical Points and Pitfalls' series is to help readers and researchers alike increase awareness of how to use statistics and why/how we fall into inappropriate choices or interpretations. We hope to help readers understand common misconceptions and give clear guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls by offering simple tips to improve your reporting of quantitative research findings. Each entry discusses a commonly encountered inappropriate practice and alternatives from a pragmatic perspective with minimal mathematics involved.

We need more replication research - A case for test-retest reliability.

Following debates in psychology on the importance of replication research, we have also started to see pleas for a more prominent role for replication research in medical education. To enable replication research, it is of paramount importance to carefully study the reliability of the instruments we use. Cronbach's alpha has been the most widely used estimator of reliability in the field of medical education, notably as some kind of quality label of test or questionnaire scores based on multiple items or of the reliability of assessment across exam stations.

Effect size - large, medium, and small.

The overall purpose of the 'Statistical Points and Pitfalls' series is to help readers and researchers alike increase awareness of how to use statistics and why/how we fall into inappropriate choices or interpretations. We hope to help readers understand common misconceptions and give clear guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls by offering simple tips to improve your reporting of quantitative research findings. Each entry discusses a commonly encountered inappropriate practice and alternatives from a pragmatic perspective with minimal mathematics involved.

Effects of learning content in context on knowledge acquisition and recall: a pretest-posttest control group design.

Background: It is generally assumed that learning in context increases performance. This study investigates the relationship between the characteristics of a paper-patient context (relevance and familiarity), the mechanisms through which the cognitive dimension of context could improve learning (activation of prior knowledge, elaboration and increasing retrieval cues), and test performance.

Methods: A total of 145 medical students completed a pretest of 40 questions, of which half were with a patient vignette.

On causality and mechanisms in medical education research: an example of path analysis.

Studies in medical education can serve a variety of purposes. Studies that have a predominantly quantitative orientation may focus on estimating relations between variables, on estimating effects of one or more variables on some other variable(s), or on series of causal relations or mechanisms. Which is the focus of a particular study depends on the theoretical framework and research questions of that study.