http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/71387 2013-05-23T14:18:12Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97017 Medical Students' Problem-Solving Skills Predict How They Experience Medical School Stansfield, R. Brent; Engelmann, Susanne; Gruppen, Larry D. Ob jective The learning environment impacts medical students’ motivation, attitudes, academic performance, and professionalism. Aspects of the learning environment— faculty and administrative treatment of students, student social experiences, consequences for intellectual honesty and ethical integrety—constitute a “hid- den curriculum” which every medical school must strive to improve. As part of the American Medical Association’s Innovative Strategies for Transforming the Education of Physicians (ISTEP) initiative, the Learning Environment Study (LES), we sought psychological predictors of student subjective experience of the learning environment. We predicted that a measure of students’ tendency to react to difficult situations immediately upon matriculation would predict how they rated various aspects of their medical school experience at the end of their second year. Methods 155 undergraduate medical students from the classes of 2014 and 2015 com- pleted a subset of the Ways of Coping Scale (WCS: 22 items comprising 8 validated subscores, Folkman & Lazarus, 1986) at the time of matriculation and the Medical Student Learning Environment Scale (MSLES: 17 items an- alyzed individually, Rosenbaum, et al, 2007) at the end of their second year. We performed multiple regression Ratings on each MSLES item by the 8 WCS subscores. Results Social aspects of medical school were rated more positively by students with higher Planful Problem-Solving and Positive Reappraisal scores: these students make conscious efforts to actively, productively address their difficult situations. In contrast, students with high Escape Avoidance scores gave lower ratings for “Students gather together for informal activities.” Students who were more emotionally controlled (high Self-Controlling scores) found the school administration less likely to take meaningful action to support students and that students were reluctant to share their troubles with each other. Student who tend to seek Social Support when dealing with problems had difficulties finding time for interests outside of medicine and reported intense competition for grades. Conclusions Students’ experience of medical school is to some extent a function of their general approach to problem-solving. To improve the learning environment, schools should be sensitive to students’ differences in this regard. Encouraging students to use planful problem-solving and positive reappraisal may have pos- itive benefits. This analysis represents one only school and an analysis of the larger multi-institutional ISTEP LES dataset may challenge the consistency of these results across schools. 2013-03-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/91292 A Good Way to Disseminate Your University of Michigan Academic Products to the General Public Through Deep Blue and Creative Commons Stansfield, R. Brent Deep Blue is a University of Michigan library system that permanantly stores electonic versions of faculty-generated content. Creative Commons is an addendum to copyright that gives people permission to disseminate and use your work. Together, these make a public publishing platform that's pretty easy to set up for academic posters, talk slides, audio recordings, published or unpublished manuscripts, data sets, what have you. 2012-06-04T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/91291 Assessment of musculoskeletal examination skills of 4th year medical students using a novel OSCE Monrad, Seetha U.; DiPonio, Lisa L.; Zeller, Joseph; Chadd, E.; Henning, P.; Pangilinan, P.; Stansfield, R. Brent Objective: Despite the high prevalence of musculoskeletal complaints presenting to physicians in the United States, there are very few opportunities for University of Michigan clinical medical students to receive formative or summative assessment of their ability to evaluate patients with these complaints. The purpose of this study was to assess 4th year students’ ability to examine and diagnose several common musculoskeletal disorders using a novel objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). Methods: A multidisciplinary team of musculoskeletal specialists developed the content and structure of three OSCE stations focusing on examination of the shoulder, back and knee. For each station, volunteer M4 students were provided a clinical vignette with three possible diagnoses to consider, and were instructed to anticipate physical examination maneuvers or findings that would discriminate between the three diagnoses. Then they would examine a professional patient simulating findings associated with one of the diagnoses and choose their favored diagnosis. Their encounter was directly observed by a faculty member who scored their performance on selected physical examination maneuvers based on a checklist (0 = not done, 1 = partially done, 2 = fully done). Each encounter was recorded to allow for later review by another faculty. Immediate feedback was provided to students at the end of the OSCE, making this a formative as well as summative assessment experience. Faculty received verbal and written instruction on how to score students. IRB exemption was obtained for this study. Results: 44 M4 students participated in the OSCE during the spring of 2012. General performance of M4 students in examining regional musculoskeletal complaints will be reported. Performance of individuals will be correlated with: anticipation of discriminatory features prior to examining the patients; self-assessment on ability to perform the relevant exam and anticipated need to do so in their future career; previous musculoskeletal elective exposure; future career choice; and performance on the M4 Comprehensive Clinical Assessment “Back pain” and “Abdominal pain” stations. Conclusions: Initial validity evidence for a multistation musculoskeletal OSCE will be presented, as will the performance of a sampling of the 2012 graduating UM medical student class. This data will be used as part of ongoing evaluation of the longitudinal musculoskeletal curriculum at the University of Michigan medical school. 2012-06-05T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/91290 Assessing the Learning Environment at the University of Michigan Medical School Through a National Collaboration Stansfield, R. Brent; Engelmann, Susan; Christner, Jennifer; Santen, Sally; Gruppen, Larry D. The Learning Environment Study involves 28 medical schools belonging to the Innovative Strategies for Transforming the Education of Physicians (ISTEP): an initiative founded by the American Medical Association in 2006. ISTEP is a unique medical education research collaborative that brings together individuals and institutions across the continuum of student/physician learning with a mission to foster evidence-based changes in physician education that will improve patient care. In early 2010, ISTEP developed a protocol to examine the undergraduate medical education environment: a prospective, repeated measures, longitudinal research design, employing a diverse set of established measures. The class of 2014 became the first cohort enrolled in this study, with 11 schools participating. A second cohort from the class of 2015 became the second cohort with 25 schools participating. The results reported here summarize the University of Michigan Medical School data for student empathy, patient-provider orientation, ways of coping, tolerance for ambiguity, and their perceptions of the learning environment at UMMS. 2012-06-05T00:00:00Z