BERKELEY, CA (UroToday.com) - The context for this manuscript demonstrated the efficacy of the inclusion of multidisciplinary perspectives for applied educational research, knowledge translation, and transfer for patient education. Acknowledging that effective education means something different in theory and practice for each health or education discipline is important and that one person of discipline may not possess all of this knowledge. Therefore, it might be unreasonable to assume that there is transferability of one educational approach in a certain context directly into another. Furthermore, all educational theories and practices need to be audience specific. How one teaches a group of undergraduate medical students or has one-to-one patient consultations does not necessarily translate well into effective learning for others.
This also addresses the methodology we choose to evaluate our teaching and learning outcomes. These educational sessions were evaluated thoughtfully after each session with a questionnaire / Likert scale. These questionnaires demonstrated a high rate of success for the program. However, upon a closer evaluation of the questionnaire we noticed that the majority of the questions were “feeling questions” … Did you “feel” this course was...? This proved problematic because the men and their partners did feel that it was an informative course. However, the question remained as to whether the course achieved what the educators intended it to, i.e., to help these men in their treatment decision-making process.
Methodologically how could we find out whether these men were learning what the course had intended? We interviewed several of the men shortly after completion of the course and found out that the information presented in the course was not being sufficiently learned for re-application in their treatment making process.
What this meant was there was a need to re-consider the audience. The patients were medical laypersons and best identified as being adult learners. Identifying and understanding the audience meant to use a different application of educational theory and practice. An additional layer of complexity was that since these men were newly diagnosed with prostate cancer, we suspected that they were distressed.
The take away message from this study was that regardless of how well developed the course becomes, the context must also be considered. Therefore, patient education sessions must start with consideration of the audience and how complex new information can be appropriately translated and transferred. A second consideration is to ensure that other experts who possess the methodological, theoretical, and practical educational knowledge that aligns with a specific audience are included in both the design and application of patient centred educational sessions. In this case, we suggested that transformational learning theory might be an appropriate adult learning approach to underpin and facilitate the knowledge translation / transfer of vital information.
Written by:
Richard Hovey, PhD as part of Beyond the Abstract on UroToday.com. This initiative offers a method of publishing for the professional urology community. Authors are given an opportunity to expand on the circumstances, limitations etc... of their research by referencing the published abstract.
The influence of distress on knowledge transfer for men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer - Abstract
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