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SimPharm: How pharmacy students made meaning of a clinical case differently in paper‐ and simulation‐based workshops
Author(s) -
Loke SweeKin,
Tordoff June,
Winikoff Michael,
McDonald Jenny,
Vlugter Peter,
Duffull Stephen
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
british journal of educational technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.79
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-8535
pISSN - 0007-1013
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01113.x
Subject(s) - affordance , framing (construction) , situated , situated cognition , meaning (existential) , mathematics education , focus group , pharmacy , psychology , pedagogy , class (philosophy) , computer science , sociology , human–computer interaction , engineering , artificial intelligence , medicine , structural engineering , family medicine , anthropology , psychotherapist
Several scholars contend that learning with computer games and simulations results in students thinking more like professionals. Bearing this goal in mind, we investigated how a group of pharmacy students learnt with an in‐house developed computer simulation, SimPharm. Adopting situated cognition as our theoretical lens, we conducted a case study involving 20 undergraduate students to tease out how they made meaning of a clinical case differently in two different contexts: a typical paper‐based workshop and one enabled by SimPharm. The data collected included audio recordings of classroom discourse, focus group interviews and class observations. The findings identified differences in four areas: framing of the problem; problem‐solving steps and tools used; sources and meaning of feedback; and conceptualisation of the patient. These four areas can serve as axes along which future evaluations of educational simulations can be carried out based on their affordances.