Thiago Santos

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

We developed a POCUS`s course for sixth year students using the 4C/ID.

By focusing on real world tasks, it integrates knowledge and skills acquisition with professional attitudes into the same learning activity.

This method also favors students to become more confident in adopting the new tool

PROBLEM

Point of Care ultrasound became an important bedside tool and medical schools are modernizing their curricula by incorporating ultrasound training in undergraduate courses.

Ultrasound courses may represent an extra cognitive burden to medical students considering the already busy medical curricula.

Thus, medical educators should systematically address the impacts of POCUS courses on students’ learning and motivation for practice.

APPROACH

In this article, we share the development of a POCUS course for sixth year medical students using the Four Components for Instructional Design (4C/ID) methodology.

By focusing on real world tasks, 4C/ID integrates knowledge and skills acquisition with professional attitudes into the same learning activity. By progressively increasing the complexity of tasks, 4C/ID favors students to become confident in adopting the new tool in their clinical practice, while assuring teachers the opportunity to modulate and optimize students’ cognitive load.

OUTCOMES

The authors observed an increase in students’ knowledge on POCUS without significant changes in students’ performance in a multidimensional assessment process.

The POCUS course stimulated students’ autonomy, self-confidence and sense of competency by supporting their clinical reasoning, and improving their understanding of the clinical situation.

Students felt more related to the teachers by sharing with them the knowledge related to POCUS and the “ultrasound” language.

NEXT STEPS

Future research is welcome to clarify in which extension POCUS can improve clinical reasoning, how autonomy and competence influences on learners’ motivation, and how intrinsic motivation can compensate the cognitive overload induced by the introduction of new learning activities.