Teaching, training and assessment of surgical skills, using human cadavers

The proposed project is a new form of interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from three fields: education, medicine and communication.

The overall purpose is to investigate systematic practices used for teaching and assessing manual skills in cadaver-based surgical training programs.

More specifically, the project aims to: a) determine the affordances and trade-offs of human cadavers for surgical training; b) specify the organization of instruction in relation to cadaver-based training, and explore the impact of a specific instructional model; and c) validate reliable methods for assessing surgical skills using video recordings of surgical performance.

In the first two years of the project, four courses will be recorded, resulting in approximately 200h of video.

Episodes where the instructors engage in the teaching of manual skills are coded for subsequent analyses, and collections of episodes of particular phenomena form the ground for empirical studies.

In addition, experts in surgery take part in focus groups and assess video recordings of surgical performance, and the group discussions and assessments are used as data about the affordances of cadaveric training and the assessment of surgical skills.

The project contributes with general knowledge about the teaching and assessment of manual skills, and specific knowledge about the value of donated human bodies and defined instructional models for such training.