Mediating reflective practice in medical education: the role of digital artefacts and digital projects
UK General Medical Council (GMC) guidelines ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’ states that graduating medical students must ‘continually and systematically reflect on practice and, whenever necessary, translate that reflection into action’ (2009, p.9). This is critical for high quality doctors, clinical outcomes and patient care.
However, reflection remains problematic in medical education (Hodges, 2015), constraining the opportunities to educate practitioners (Bleakley, 1999). In line with recent studies and commentaries in the literature (for example Bleakley, 1999; 2010; Hodges, 2015 and Ng et al., 2015), reflective practices amongst medical students constitute a mayor problem in need of further definition and investigation. At the same time, because digital technologies can contribute to reconfiguring or changing what learning is and how it is conducted (Säljö, 2010), we are currently investigating the role of digital artefacts and digital projects as mechanisms for brokering reflective practices in medical students.
The aim of this project is to investigate reflective practice in student-initiated digital projects as part of the Technology Enhanced Learning in Medical Education (TELME). More precisely, the study explores the role of digital artefacts and digital projects as mechanisms for brokering reflective practices in third-year medical students. We focused on medical students’ reflective practices when creating their digital resources for learning and teaching as part of their Student Selected Component (SSC), as these are concerned with the creation of teaching and learning resources and independent study. The beliefs, concepts and definitions on which medical students drew when creating their SSC were explored, as well as their reflective accounts submitted with their e-learning resources. If you want to know more, check the Resources page for outputs.