In a recent quasi-experimental pilot study, Emmert and Cai tested an assessment tool designed to evaluate students’ teamwork skills, and assessed the effectiveness of an interprofessional education (IPE) course.
Participants were health professional students (physical therapy, pharmacy, dental and osteopathic medicine) 24 of whom were second-year students who had previously taken part in an IPE course (experimental group), and 22 of whom were third years that had not (control group). Students interacted with a standardized patient and her son during an asynchronous Team Objective Structured Clinical Exam (TOSCE), after which they were scored on their teamwork skills using newly designed teamwork rating scales.
Cronbach Alpha calculations suggested that the rating scales were reliable when rater scores were aggregated (0.81). Pearson coefficient calculations determined that teamwork scores of live raters and video raters were significantly correlated (p < 0.0001), suggesting good consistency across these raters. The experimental group performed significantly better (p = 0.0003) than the control group, suggesting that the IPE curriculum is successfully equipping students with teamwork skills.
The results of this study contribute to the much needed IPE assessment literature, and suggest that teamwork skills can be taught and effectively assessed using this new rating scale.
For more: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/13561820.2015.1025373