A staff-student co-enquiry investigation of peer to peer Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) revision in medical imaging

This presentation is relevant to the conference theme of ‘Students in Curriculum Transformation’ as it presents an concrete example of students acting as change agents in curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy, but also an example of a staff-student co-enquiry partnership to design and implement the evaluation study. In 2016 a second year student from a Medical Imaging degree at an Australian University had a conversation with an academic staff member, who explained how he was having difficulty engaging first year students in effective two-way communication regarding understanding key concepts of the course –he perceived that this was due to a hierarchical gap in authority between students and staff. The presence of such gaps can lead to barriers in learning opportunities by impeding effective communication (Light, Calkins, & Cox, 2009). The second year student suggested that they, being students themselves, could assist with this challenge by offering peer-to-peer (P2P) learning opportunities. Peer to peer (P2P) learning has shown to be an effective teaching method (Boud, Cohen, & Sampson, 2014) in higher education, with students bringing unique perspectives and ways of communicating to students. Peer assisted learning has been widely used in medical education (Dickson, Harrington, & Carter, 2011), including in areas such as clinical skills training and exam revision such as mock Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs) (Cushing, Abbott, Lothian, Hall, & Westwood, 2011; Gill, Ong, & Cleland, 2012) with positive educational results for both groups of students. However, in most of these instances, academic staff have still played a significant role in the mock OSCE. This study adds to this existing literature by describing the use of a wholly student run mock OSCE within medical imaging education. This presentation will describe the process taken by the student mentoring team to conduct a mock OSCE completely independent of academic staff. The presentation will showcase the decision making process in the design of the OSCE, including developing station content and marking sheets, the running of the OSCE and the provision of feedback to students. It will also present pilot data from students regarding their experiences of the mock OSCE, which was collected via anonymous survey. Conclusions will focus on what the mentoring team learned from running the mock OSCE, and the impact the mock OSCE had on student’s confidence to undertake the ‘real’ OSCE. Implications for including P2P mock OSCEs as a sustainable addition to the Medical Imaging program will be discussed.