BEACONtheThe Quarterly Newsle�er of the HPD Center

for Teaching and Learning

Volume 6, Number 1

Save the Date

April 18, 2011“Evaluating Classroom Tests”

Lunchtime Seminarwith Patrick Hardigan, Ph.D.

Chancellor’s Dining Room

May 3, 2011“NIH Grant Writing Workshop—

How to Improve YourGrant Success”

Half-Day Workshopswith Various Presenters

Sherman Library, MR 2053

February 10, 2012HPD Research Day

Please RSVP toKathleen Hagen at(954) 262-1235 or khagen@nova.edu.

NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY HEALTH PROFESSIONS DIVISION

NOTICE OF ACCREDITATION/NONDISCRIMINATIONNova Southeastern University admits students of any age, race,color, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, religion or creed,nondisqualifying disability, and national or ethnic origin. NovaSoutheastern University is accredited by the Commission onColleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools(1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, Georgia, 30033-4097; telephonenumber: 404-679-4501) to award associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s,educational specialist, and doctoral degrees.

April 2011

HPERS HighlightsThe Health Professions Educational Research Symposium (HPERS) held its fourth conferenceon January 15. Attendance at the event was up compared to the last few conferences. Whilethe majority of presenters were NSU faculty members, guests from South Carolina, Nevada,Ohio, and Virginia contributed to an enriching day of keynote addresses, presentations, work-shops, and discussions.

The theme of this year’s event―Recognizing, Teaching, and Modeling Professionalism―prompted a wide range of excellent presentations, from how to teach in the affective domain,to how to guide students in becoming self-monitoring professionals. Abstracts of the presen-tations are available on the HPERS Web site located at www.nova.edu/hpers. If you would likehelp in reaching a presenter, please contact Kathleen Hagen at khagen@nova.edu.

Franklin Medio, Ph.D., a professional educator with an independent consult-ing practice, gave the opening keynote address entitled “Teaching Profes-sionalism: Do Generational Differences Really Make a Difference?” Drawingupon 30 years of experience in medical education, most recently 10 years as di-rector of the Office of Graduate Medical Education at the Medical University ofSouth Carolina, Dr. Medio gave the attendees clear, practical, and insightfulapproaches to dealing with problem students.

He backed up the concepts with real-world examples. Two of his foundational principles canguide educators and administrators faced with difficult student situations. First, all institutionsaccredited to train future health professionals must have as their primary duty protection ofthe public. Second, all decisions dealing with student behavior should be based upon sound ed-ucational and clinical (i.e., patient safety) principles. He pointed out that faculty members canget sidetracked by factors such as likeability (“But he’s such a nice guy.”), effort (“She’s tryingreal hard.”), or cognitive abilities (“His test scores are very high.”).

Faculty members are often uncomfortable dealing with incidents of unprofessional conductand avoid talking with the student (e.g., “I don’t want to upset her,” “I don’t want to be mean,be the bad guy,” etc.). Faculty members and administrators can also get distracted by irrele-vant factors such as student loan debt or timing of an incident (e.g., on the last day of a clini-cal rotation) and allow the student to continue without correcting the problem.

Dr. Medio challenged the audience to address unprofessional student behavior as a teachingopportunity whenever we see it. A behavioral problem or unprofessional conduct rarely ap-pears in full bloom. In most cases, it starts small—a rude comment, an unexcused absencefrom clinic, a late class assignment, etc. It continues to grow when faculty members and ad-ministrators ignore it, make excuses for the student, minimize the seriousness of it, or passthe buck. Eventually, the student does something so outrageous or egregious that it cannotbe ignored or excused.

Dr. Medio provided conference attendees with a handout entitled “The Self-Discipline ofBeing a Professional,” which lists seven essential behavioral elements that promote excellencein patient care...• Being Present • Being Prepared •Being Proficient• Being Presentable • Being Polite •Being Proactive• Being Punctual

Each element is supported by important patient-care principles. He con-cluded by reminding the audience that it is the faculty’s responsibilityto establish standards of professional conduct as part of the curriculum.

The full document can be found at:http://atsudentalclinic.com/kcom/preceptors/

professional_development/pdfs/selfdiscipline.pdf.Please feel free to share it with your students.

Carol M. Davis, D.P.T., Ed.D., professor emerita in theDepartment of Physical Therapy at the University ofMiami Miller School of Medicine, gave the closing ad-dress entitled “Educating and Evaluating Students inthe Affective Domain/Helping Students Mature intoAdult Health Professionals.” Dr. Davis is internation-ally recognized for her writing and teaching in the

areas of affective education, ethics, and complementary therapies inrehabilitation. She also is the author of Patient Practitioner Interac-tion—An Experiential Manual for Developing the Art of Health Care, nowin its fifth edition published by Slack, Inc.

In her talk, Dr. Davis distinguished affective behaviors from cognitiveand psychomotor behaviors, and emphasized the difficulty we have inevaluating behaviors that reflect primarily attitudes and values be-cause we do not carefully describe the ideal behavior we are lookingfor from our students. The behaviors of a mature healing professionalare not simply positive personality traits, but instead are those be-haviors that have been determined to facilitate healing in health careinteractions. They are characterized by positive emotion and a senseof “coming together” in contrast to behaviors that would be deter-mined to be negative, alienating, and fragmenting.

Once a faculty works together to describe precisely the be-havior desired, the process becomes easier to spot it—or thelack of it—in the educational interaction. Designing learn-ing experiences to teach appropriate behaviors dependson being creative in helping students to recognize lacksin their behavior, and then through empathy and roleplaying, help students to change their behavior ac-cording to a precise description of what is wanted.

With regard to evaluating professional behaviors,it is important for a faculty to be united in its will-ingness to call students out for their negative be-haviors, and enforce standards of conduct for thegood of patient care and healthy collegial interac-tion. Being consistent and insistent is primary tostudents who will often interpret inconsistency aspermission to do whatever they wish.

HPERS would not be possible without the efforts ofmany people. In particular, the HPERS co-chairswould like to thank the following individuals for theirvolunteering their time and expertise to ensuringHPERS success:

• student volunteers from the College of Allied Health and Nursing Physical Therapy Program

• committee members:– Stan Cohen, Ed.D.– Jolanta Czerwinska, Ph.D. – Marti Echols, Ph.D.– Patrick Hardigan, Ph.D. – Cheryl Purvis, Ph.D.

• panelists: – Edye Groseclose, Ph.D.– Betty Harris, Pharm.D.– Adrienne Lauer, Ed.D.– Justin Robison, second-year NSU-COM student(led by panel discussion moderator Hilda De Gaetano, D.O.)

• moderators:– Mary Tischio Blackinton, Ed.D.– Jennifer Canbek, B.S., P.T.– Rose Colón, Ph.D.– Patricia Dittman, Ph.D.– Patricia Gaffney, Au.D.– Kathleen Hagen, M.M.– William Hardigan, Ph.D.– Cheryl Hill, Ph.D.– Susan Ryan, M.P.A.S.

The BestTeachers

Arethe Best

Storytellers

BY STAN COHEN, ED.D., HPD EXECUTIVE DEAN

Stan’sSoapBox

One of the most effective methods of teaching is to illustrate an ideaor concept by sharing a real story. The thought processes flow in asequence that show the connection between simple and complexideas. Let me illustrate: Rachael Remen, M.D., described her storyabout rock collection with the following dialogue:

“My husband loved to collect rocks, so we took a trip to the Midwestand stopped at a quarry where three men were carving rocks.I approached each one with the questions, ‘What are you doing, andwhy are you doing it?’ The first man replied that he was carving rocksinto 5 x 9-inch pieces, that this is the only thing he knew how to do, andthat he wished he could retire. The second man said this is how heearned money to support his three children and his handicapped wifewho could not work, so he was the sole source of money. He, too, wascutting the rocks into 5 x 9-inch pieces, and wished he could dosomething else to earn the money.

“So I turned to the third man, who was smiling, and again he wascutting rocks into 5 x 9-inch pieces, and he seemed so satisfied withwhat he was doing,” Dr. Remen added. “When I asked him why he wasdoing this, he replied, ‘Every day at 4:30 the truck comes by to pick up

my beautiful rocks and take them about five miles away where theyare building a cathedral, and for the next 100 years every person thatvisits will have the benefit of my rocks. I love the contribution I ammaking, and I hope to continue this work forever.’”

Dr. Remen could have said in one sentence how important it is to feelgood about what you are doing at work, but the story was so muchmore effective. I heard her story about four years ago, and I will neverforget it.

Certainly in your work world, you have experienced real situations thatyou could share with students. The application of classroomknowledge told in story form grabs the emotions as well as theintellect. The emotional things are the ones that last a long time. Try itonce and evaluate the result.

In today’s society, many people feel the need to multitask in order tokeep up with the volume of information coming their way. Emails, voice-mails, text messages, and tweets all seem to clamor for our immediateattention, and in our struggle to silence the beeps, dings, and pings, wemultitask. We listen to our phone messages while driving, text while walk-ing to our next appointment, and carry on an instant messaging con-versation while we’re working on a presentation. However, the evidenceis mounting that we are not being as productive as we think. When wemultitask, most of the time we are really engaged in task switching. Whenwe task switch, both tasks suffer a loss of efficiency and quality (Will-ingham, 2010).

At this point, you may be saying to yourself, “I’m sure that’s true formost people, but I’m an excellent multitasker.” There are a number ofonline tests you can take to see how well you multitask. Here is one thatcan be done in less than three minutes at http://davecrenshaw.com/mul-titasking-example/ (Dave Crenshaw, 2011). It is a great demonstrationof the fact that even with two simple tasks, task switching reduces speedand accuracy (Willingham, 2010). Or, you can try this demonstration onselective attention at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

(Simons, 1999). If you find the video interesting, you may want to readthe author’s book on the limits of attention. You won’t get the full im-pact of the video if you read the book title before seeing the video, sothe author and title are printed upside down at the bottom of this ar-ticle. You may want to use either (or both) of these online tests withyour students to demonstrate why it is so important that they (1) cometo class (because if the input of your lecture/presentation never madeit into their minds, it won’t materialize later) and (2) pay attention (be-cause if they don’t notice the input, it never happened as far as theirbrains are concerned).

Your younger students will probably do better on multitasking tests thanyou. Young people still do worse on multitasking versus single tasks,but in laboratory tests young people do better on multitasking than old-er people. The advantage is a function of how much working memoryis available, and younger people generally have more available work-ing memory than older adults (Willingham, 2010).

There are two areas in which some people can multitask without de-grading their performance. First, some studies show that background

The Art of MultitaskingBY KATHLEEN HAGEN, M.M., HPD DIRECTOR OF FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

Multitasking

music is distracting, although others show it is not.Some studies show that listening to non-vocal mu-sic does not distract, but vocal music does. Somestudies show that extroverts can listen to music andstill perform another task well, but introverts reportbeing distracted by background music. So, if you arean extrovert listening to non-vocal music, you maybe able to multitask (Willingham, 2010).

Second, some individuals possess multitasking abil-ities beyond those of the majority of the world’s pop-ulation. A study done by two researchers from theUniversity of Utah (Watson & Strayer, 2010) found that2.5 percent of the population they tested was ableto perform two tasks simultaneously without anymeasurable degradation of performance. The twotasks were driving in a simulator and responding tomath and memory questions asked through a head-set (thus mimicking the use of a hands-free cellphone). The other 97.5 percent of the study partic-ipants exhibited significant reductions in perform-ance quality when the two tasks were combined: in-creased braking time, decreased following distanceon the driving simulator tasks, and decreased scoreson the memory and math tests (Watson & Strayer,2010).

In conclusion, consider this recent finding: A “studyexamining multitasking ability found that individu-als who report multitasking more frequently multi-task less well than those who are less frequent mul-titaskers” (Watson & Strayer, 2010). If we want todo our best on any given task, we should focus onit only. That focus could be seen as a shift from “justdo it” to “do just it.”

REFERENCES

Crenshaw, D. (2011, January 20). Re: Think you’re good at multitasking? Take this test. [Web log message].Retrieved from http://davecrenshaw.com/multitasking-example/

Simons, D. J. (1999). Selective attention test [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Watson, J. M., & Strayer, D. L. (2010). Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review,17, 479-485. doi:10.3758/PBR.17.4.479

Willingham, D. T. (2010). Have technology and multitasking rewired how students learn? American Educator, 34(2), 23-28.Retrieved from http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2010/Willingham.pdf

Chabris, C. F., & Simon, D. J. (2010). The invisible gorilla: And other ways our intuitions deceive us. New York, NY: Crown Publishing.