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This study compares the influence of two learning conditions – a screen-based virtual reality radiology simulator and a conventional PowerPoint slide presentation – that teach radiographic interpretation to dental students working in small collaborative groups. The study focused on how the students communicated and how proficient they became at radiographic interpretation. The sample consisted of 36 participants – 20 women and 16 men – and used a pretest/posttest group design with the participants randomly assigned to either a simulation-training group (SIM) or conventional-training group (CON) with three students in each collaborative group. The proficiency tests administered before and after training assessed interpretations of spatial relations in radiographs using parallax. The training sessions were video-recorded. The results showed that SIM groups exhibited significant development between pretest and posttest results, whereas the CON groups did not. The collaboration in the CON groups involved inclusive peer discussions, thorough interpretations of the images, and extensive use of subject-specific terminology. The SIM group discussions were much more fragmented and included more action proposals based on their actions with the simulator. The different learning conditions produced different results with respect to acquiring understanding of radiographic principles.

This article is about collaborative learning with educational computer-assisted simulation(ECAS) in health care education. Previous research on training with a radiological virtual reality simulator has indicated positive effects on learning when compared to a more conventional alternative. Drawing upon the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, we investigate collaborative patterns, their causes, and their implications for learning. We investigate why the extent of application of subject-specific terminology differs between simulation training and more conventional training. We also investigate how the student-simulator interaction affordances produce collaborative patterns and impact learning. Proficiency tests before and after training, observations during training, and interviews after training constitute the empirical foundation. Thirty-six dentistry students volunteered for participation. The results showed that not only the task but also the medium of feedback impacts the application of subject-specific terminology. However, no relation to proficiency development was revealed.We identified turn-taking as well as dominance patterns of student-simulator interaction but again found no relation to proficiency development. Further research may give us deeper insights into if and how these collaborative patterns, in other respects, impact collaborative learning with ECAS in health care education.

This chapter is about designing for learning in educational computer-assisted simulations (ECAS) in health care education (HCE). This is an area in need of an informed educational framework for analysis and design, on a research level as well as on a practice level. Drawing upon the works of Luckin (2008, 2010), an Ecology of Resources framework is proposed, which, informed by experiences from the research field (Gaba, 2004; Issenberg et al., 2005), can support researchers as well as practitioners in analyzing and designing health care simulations. Using this framework, we will discuss original empirical data from two studies from the Learning Radiology in Simulated Environments project, and more specifically how changes in design, or adjustments to the Ecology of Resources, impact the simulation process. Data include video-recorded observations of collaborative simulation training, a student questionnaire directly after training and later follow-up interviews. We will illustrate the usefulness of the framework and point out some challenges and suggestions for future development and research.

This study explores collaborative training with educational computer assisted simulations (ECAS) in health care education. The use of simulation technology is increasing in health care education (Issenberg et al., 2005; Bradley, 2006), and research is addressing the techniques of its application. Calls have been made for informing the field with existing and future educational research (e.g. Issenberg et al., 2011). This study investigates and examines collaboration as a technique for structuring simulation training. Part of a larger research and development project (Häll et al., 2011; Häll & Söderström, 2012), this paper pri- marily utilizes qualitative observation analysis of dentistry students learning radiology to investigate the challenges that screen-based simulation technology poses for collaborative learning. Grounded in Luckin’s ecology of resources framework (Luckin, 2010) and informed by computer-supported collabora- tive learning (CSCL) research, the study identifies some disadvantages of free collaboration that need to be dealt with for collaboration to be a beneficial technique for ECAS in health care education. The dis- cussion focuses on the use of scripts (Weinberger et al., 2009) to filter the interactions between the learner and the more able partner, supporting the collaborative-learning activity and enhancing learning with ECAS in health care education.