Assessing the impact of a Clinical Audiology Simulator on first year students

Virtual Patients (VPs) have been successful in health education to promote and foster communication. Additionally, computer simulations offer the advantage of being standardized, repeatable, and do not require as much resources as role-play simulations. The research presented in this paper offers to explore the impact of a Clinical Audiology Simulator (CAS) using virtual patients technology on first year audiology students of the University of Canterbury. We look at the CAS’s effects on students’ perceived level of learning, confidence, and ability to conduct adequate Pure tone audiometry as well as Clinical history taking procedures. These studies showed positive results on students’ perceived level of learning, and history taking skills when using the CAS as an additional training tool. We present the findings and lessons learned from these studies as well as our plans for future experiments and software implementations. VPs have the potential to offer audiology trainees more opportunities to practice and access to a wider range of pathologies as they would with their course’s traditional practical sessions.