Examining Audiology Students' Clinical Collaboration Skills When Using Virtual Audiology Cases Aided With No Collaboration, Live Collaboration, and Virtual Collaboration.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine students' ability to use effective clinical collaboration online in a designed scaffolded environment. Three groups were formed to achieve this goal: two control groups (one using no collaboration and one using live, face-to-face collaboration) and one treatment group using virtual collaboration. A quasi-experimental design was conducted at two U.S. universities to examine whether there is a significant difference in clinical reasoning skills between three treatment groups using IUP Audiosim software. Two computer-based audiology case simulations were developed, and participants were randomly placed into the three groups. The clinical reasoning data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance and Tukey's post hoc analyses. The results indicated that there was a significant difference in clinical reasoning skills between the three treatment groups. The score obtained by the no-collaboration group was significantly less than the scores obtained by the virtual and live collaboration groups. The results imply that lower scores were associated with students receiving more instructor-designed content and higher scores with students receiving less instructor-designed content. Students who received more scaffolds with the collaborations may have demonstrated better decision-making outside the training exercise than those who did not receive scaffolds. However, lower scores on the exercise did not necessarily imply lower skill. Lower scores simply implied a different path toward mastery.