Background: Communication is a human skill that can develop through learning and teaching, Although, this is an integral component of clinical activities of physicians, still the dominant attitude in medical education is biological. There is a little attention to communication skills in formal medical education program. The aim of this study was to determine communication skills and professiona...

BACKGROUND Despite many high-quality programs in basic surgical-skill education, the surgical skill of junior doctors varies widely. This, together with the waning interest in surgery as a career among medical students, is a serious issue confronted by hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide. We, therefore, developed and implemented an intensive one-day surgical-skill training course for two...

Inherent difficulties in evaluating clinical competence of physicians has lead to the widespread use of subjective skill assessment techniques. Inspired by an analogy between medical procedure and spoken language, proven modeling methods in the field of speech recognition were adapted for use as objective skill assessment techniques. A generalized methodology using Markov Models (MM) was develo...

CONTEXT The National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners uses the Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment (OMT) Global Rating Tool to score candidate performance in OMT during standardized patient encounters. To the authors' knowledge, no validity research has been published on the underlying constructs measured by this instrument to date. OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether the OMT Global Rating Too...

BACKGROUND Every procedural skill consists of some microskills. One of the effective techniques for teaching a main procedural skill is to deconstruct the skill into a series of microskills and train students on each microskill separately. When we learn microskills, we will learn the main skill also. This model can be beneficial for tuition on procedural skills. OBJECTIVE In this study, we pr...

An interesting aspect of games is the relative extent to which a player can positively influence his results by making appropriate strategic choices. This question is closely related to the issue of how to distinguish between games of skill and games of chance. The distinction between these two types of games is definitely interesting from a juridical point of view. Borm and Van der Genugten (2...

Employers expect graduates and postgraduates to demonstrate their education through more than good grades. Learning activities that develop subject skills during formalized programmes of undergraduate and postgraduate study also develop employability skills, if the curriculum is suitably aligned, and developmental planning is supported. Only little extra provision is required, but all developme...

PURPOSE The effect of e-learning on practical skills in medicine has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Today's multimedia learning environment and access to e-books provide students with more knowledge than ever before. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of online demonstrations concerning the quality of orthodontic appliances manufactured by undergraduate dental students. MA...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The most remarkable behavioral asymmetry is handedness. The preferred hand often has better performance, motor strength, nonpreferred hand. However, whether these components are associated with skill learning is not clear. METHODS We evaluated healthy right-handers by setting a series of motor-performance tasks including skill learning, grip strength, and speed. RESUL...

This article presents a generalization of the equilibrium analysis for the simple two-player poker game with alternate bidding of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. It approximates optimal play for this game if it is played with a regular deck of 52 cards and it discusses some strategic insights. In addition, the paper studies the relative skill level of this game.