Sprecher
Beschreibung
In the project DigiFall – funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia – an online self-assessment is currently being developed to help students in applying and deepening their communication and counselling-related skills. Communication and counseling skills are particularly important in social and health-related professions (e.g., Herter-Ehlers, 2021). However, teaching these skills in higher education is complex for several reasons: teachers are confronted with diverse students with very different prior experiences and reflective skills. In addition, teaching these skills ideally requires a strong practical focus, which is difficult to achieve due to the different practical experiences of teachers and the lack of time available to prepare real case scenarios (e.g., Hempel et al., 2021).
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a promising method for meeting the above-mentioned and other challenges in the teaching of communication and counseling skills. At the core of PBL are complex, open-ended problems or case scenarios that challenge learners to gather, analyze, understand, and ultimately develop solutions. The literature on PBL highlights various of its benefits such as its capacity to foster critical, reflective, and creative thinking (Black-burn, 2015), or the centrality of students (Abercrombie, Parkes, and McCarty, 2015). Until now no research has been carried out to investigate how one of the most crucial elements of PBL, the underlying problem or case that is investigated, can be developed and how it can be tailored to the needs of diverse students and teachers. Two central challenges guide the de-velopmental process of the cases for PBL in the DigiFall-Online-Self-Assessment: As the cases should be used in social, educational and health-related contexts in particular, we see an (1) increasing (multi-) professionalization of social and educational occupational fields, and an (2) increasing complexity of the professional reality.
Since the developmental process is usually a black box, we would like to exemplify how to derive evidence-based digital cases and digital PBL environments. Additionally, we are going to show the importance of a comprehensive needs assessment with teachers, students and practitioners. Furthermore, we would like to discuss how we meet the above-mentioned chal-lenges in social, educational and health-related contexts by carrying out a needs assessments, and communicative validations, and critically discuss our methodological approaches. In this way, we can contribute to evidence-based practice in the context of PBL.
Literature
Hempel, L., Kienle, R., Kiessling, C., Löffler-Stastka, H., Philipp, S., Rockenbauch, K. et al. (2021). Special issue on teaching social and communicative competences - status quo. GMS Journal for Medical Education, 38(3). https://doi.org/10.3205/zma001468
Herter-Ehlers, U. (2021). Reflexion von kommunikativen Kompetenzen. In U. Herter-Ehlers (Hrsg.), Grundlagen der Kommunikation für Gesundheitsberufe. Leitfaden für Logopäden, Physiotherapeuten, Ergotherapeuten und Pflege (essentials, S. 37–44). Wiesbaden: Sprin-ger. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35421-3_7