Weaving together peer assessment, audios and medical vignettes in teaching medical terms

Peer Feedback: Recommendations for Behavior Analysts' Training and Supervision

The increase in demand for behavior analysts in recent years has also increased the importance of effective supervision practices in the field of behavior analysis. A critical supervisory skill is performance feedback, which entails proficiency with two distinct, yet inseparable repertoires of technical and nontechnical skills. Supervisors report never receiving explicit training in feedback (Sellers et al., 2019) and graduate training programs provide little to no training in nontechnical skills (LeBlanc, Taylor et al., 2020b; Pastrana et al., 2018). As with any skill, to develop proficiency with feedback delivery and reception, trainees may require ample practice opportunities. One mechanism to provide trainees routine practice opportunities is to use peers as behavior change agents and peer feedback as an instructional method. The utility of peer feedback has been recognized in the organizational behavior management (OBM) literature (e.g., behavior-based safety interventions; Lebbon et al., 2012; Wirth & Sigurdsson, 2008), and has been used successfully in medical student training and evaluation for several decades. In the context of behavior analytic training and supervision peer feedback has yet to be established as a training method. Similarities in the behavioral and medical fields (e.g., significance of professional and interpersonal skills for successful therapeutic relationships) make the medical field a good model from which behavior analysts can learn. Using peer feedback in training and supervision for behavior analysts may provide trainees with similar benefits to those reported in medical student training literature.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40617-022-00761-1.

Assessing the pharmacy students' knowledge of common medical terms after a curricular change in Saudi Arabia

Medical terminology is the vocabulary used to describe the human body and its conditions; fluency in this language is essential for health care professionals. We examined the level of basic medical terminology understanding among 347 pharmacy students in four different colleges of pharmacy in Saudi Arabia using a newly developed test of 30 multiple choice questions. Students in the relatively new colleges of pharmacy were more likely to have a higher score in the medical terminology test compared to their counterparts from the old college of pharmacy (β = 1.23, 95% CI = 0.16–2.30, P-value = 0.02). Female gender (β = 1.72, 95% CI = 0.57–2.88, P-value = 0.003), and advanced class level (β = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.36–1.32, P-value < 0.001) were also positively associated with high medical terminology test scores. The findings of this study reveal a deficiency in the pharmacy students’ level of understanding of basic medical terms which may necessitate a reintroduction of the medical terminology course into the pharmacy curriculum.