Abstract
Thirty-seven abstracts were selected for presentation at the 27
th
annual meeting of the Association for Surgical Education, held March 2007, in Washington, D.C. Based on common themes eight abstracts were chosen for publication under the auspices of the Alliance for Clinical Education. These abstracts have been modified to be self-contained and understandable to those who have not attended the meeting or are from non-surgical disciplines.
The first two abstracts use the method of Cognitive-Task-Analysis, which translates an expert's knowledge of a procedure or skill into a basic outline of sequential steps and decision points. This outline in turn can be used to teach novices attempting to learn a skill or to provide guidance to the expert attempting to teach this skill. The first abstract used this method to teach decision making during tendon repair, while the second used the method to identify omission of relevant steps while teaching colonoscopy.
The next group of abstracts explored surgical skills. The impact of a curriculum focused on error recognition did not improve acquisition of skills. The next abstract in this group examined the age-related decay of skills.
Self-assessment was the focus of two abstracts. Both found a lack of correlation between faculty assessment and self-assessment of non-operative clinical skills, while in contrast there was a high correlation with respect to intra-operative skills.
Use of emerging technology for enhancing education was a common theme in many of the works presented at the meeting. One technology-based abstract is presented in which the use of virtual patients was found to reduce anxiety and improve learning when teaching medical students sexual-history taking skills.
The final abstract investigated the role of emotional intelligence, which has implications for individual training in the areas of interpersonal communication, and team leadership, both of which are essential to the competency of practice-based learning.