The Role of Medical Error and the Emotions it Induces in Learning - A Study Using Virtual Patients

摘要

Virtual Patients (VPs) and Affective Learning are promising tools in the research for enhancement of educational efficacy. The purpose of this research is to explore the effect of medical error and the emotions it evokes on learning by using these tools. A sample of four undergraduate medical students took part in the experiment. Each student managed two VPs, while connected to biosignal recording devices (heart rate, skin conductance, brain activity, pupil diameter). Before and after managing the VPs, each student filled in a sheet for each VP, containing one competence self-evaluation question and one knowledge assessment question, so that possible differences in their responses could be spotted. The results showed that: a) medical errors with VPs can probably have slight effects on the affect state as indicated by the biosignals, b) some of the errors made by the students with virtual patients did contribute to learning - for the rest of the errors there were no control questions. This research was unable to establish a correlation between the affect state following an error and the learning outcome.