Evaluation of a communication skills program for first-year medical students at the University of Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Effective doctor-patient communication has been linked to numerous benefits for both patient and physician. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the University of Toronto's Therapeutic Communication Program (TCom) at improving first-year medical students' communication skills. METHODS: Data were collected during the 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99 and 1999/00 academic years. The study used a repeated measures design with a waiting list control group: students were randomly assigned to groups starting the educational intervention in either September (N = 38) or February (N = 41), with the latter being used as a control for the former. Communication skills were assessed at the pre- and post-intervention times and at the end of the academic year from the perspectives of student, standardized patient and external rater. RESULTS: Only the external rater, using an instrument designed to assess the students' empathy based on their written responses, showed a time x group interaction effect (p = 0.039), thereby partially supporting the hypothesis that TCom improved the students' communication skills. Students rated themselves less positively after participation in the program (p = 0.038), suggesting that self-evaluation was an ineffective measure of actual performance or that the program helped them learn to more accurately assess their abilities. CONCLUSION: The lack of strong findings may be partly due to the study's small sample sizes. Further research at other medical or professional schools could assess the effectiveness of similar courses on students' communication skills and on other capacities that were not measured in this study, such as their understanding of and comfort with patients, their management of the doctor-patient relationship, and their ability to give and receive feedback.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".