research
|
Head:Dr. Ruth von Brachel |
|
Principal Investigator and Team
Dr. Ruth von Brachel
Dr. Verena Pflug
Prof.
Dr. Silvia Schneider
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Margraf
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Margraf
Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Duration
36 Months
Description
Clinical psychologists give diagnoses to their patients everyday and these diagnoses determine if and how these patients will be treated. Misdiagnoses can have severely adverse effects. Therefore, teaching diagnostic skills to clinical psychologists is very important during their undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate training. One major problem in teaching diagnostics is that there are too few opportunities to practice with real patients due to legal and ethical restrictions. The aim of the DiSkO-project is, therefore, the development and evaluation of a blended learning course to teach diagnostic skills to (future) clinical psychologists. We would like to make the diagnostic training more practical by presenting a series of video files of simulated diagnostic interviews in an online course. These video files will be divided in different segments and presented with questions and automatic feedback. In a second step, learners will make a transfer to a real face-to-face diagnostic situation with an actor simulating a patient. The DiSkO- course will be implemented on Moodle and will be evaluated in a randomized-controlled trial at three universities in Germany (Ruhr-University, University of Koblenz Landau, University of Cologne). We will conduct a noninferiority-analysis to test whether students are equally good in administering a diagnostic interview after taking the DiSkO-course compared to students who took part in a traditional face-to-face university course. Furthermore, we will compare diagnostic knowledge and attitudes toward evidence-based assessment after taking part in DiSkO vs. the face-to-face course. We aim at disseminating our open source DiSkO-course to other universities or institutions of tertiary education in Germany together with the German Psychological Association and the German Association for Behavioral Child and Adolescent Therapy. We are convinced that we thereby can improve the diagnostic training for students, better prepare them for their clinical practice and thus improve patients’ health care in Germany.