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.
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