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Screenshot of the HOWARD online platform

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Researchers

• Susanne P. Lajoie, ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ U.
• Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Indiana U.
• Jeff Wiseman, ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ U.
• Ricki Goldman, NYU
• James Lester, North Carolina State U.

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Research Assistants

• Ofelia Mangen Sypher, NYU
• Ruth Kimberly Sherman, NYU
• Jiyoon Jung, Indiana U.
• Maedeh Kazemitabar, ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ U.
• Lila Lee, ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ U.
• Tenzin Doleck, ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ U.

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Project Description

Communication plays a significant role in the physician's’ lives, yet the challenges of becoming a physician are such that non-technical skills, such as how to break bad news to patients and show caring and empathy are minimally covered, despite research showing that such communication plays a critical role in patients’ decisions. This research examines the effectiveness of an international on-line project intended to help students learn from video-case based scenarios that foster clinical decision making about emotionally sensitive issues. Part of this decision-making involves the development of appropriate communication skills and professionalism in difficult situations. Our goal is to help students learn to: (a) communicate about cases in a professional manner with each other and with medical experts (locally and internationally); (b) to provide a practice environment for students to evaluate and critique cases varying in appropriate professional behavior; and (d) to provide a practice environment for students to practice their own skills at physician-patient communication with feedback from experts assessing their performance.
To this end, we have developed an online asynchronous workshop that uses a hybrid problem-¬based learning (PBL) pedagogy called HOWARD (Helping Others With Argumentation and Reasoning Dashboard). In this workshop, medical students are exposed to bad news delivery models, contrasting cultural expectations of patients, and the experiences of veteran physicians. The cases include (but are not limited to) those that exemplify physician-patient communication in different contexts, such as: communicating bad news to patients and to patient families; handling patients who do not want to communicate with the physician; triage situations where the communication must be done quickly, accurately and sensitively. Medical students will engage in synchronous or asynchronous international dialogues about appropriate ways to improve physician-patient communication and support each other’s learning in this asynchronous PBL workshop.
This funded project is run under theme 2 of the LEADS partnership grant with collaboration of LEADS researchers and students: Susanne Lajoie, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Jeffrey Wiseman, Ricki Goldman, Peter Hogaboam, Maedeh Kazemitabar, Steven Bodnar, Tenzin Doleck, and Jiyoon Jung.

Selected Publications

Workshop CBLE at ICLS

Creating Instructor Dashboards

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