Digital teaching and assessment of psychomotor skills of the ENT mirror examination

Lakner, T.; Polk, M. L.; Kluge, A.; Neudert, M.

Introduction Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, curricular teaching is facing an immense challenge. The ENT block internship at the University Hospital Dresden was offered fully digital for the first time in summer semester 2020. The focus was on teaching and assessing psychomotor skills of ENT mirror examination. Methods 241 students were provided with a digital script, instructional videos about the standardized ENT mirror examination and a disposable ENT instrument set. 188 students also received a one-hour real-time teleteaching session with an ENT physician. 53 students received no teleteaching. The students had to submit a video of their standardized mirror examination and specify their individual practice time. The videos were evaluated using a checklist-based assessment (maximum 100 points). Results The average total score of all students is 86,1±0,09. Students with teleteaching achieve significantly (p=0,005) higher scores (87,0±0,09) than students without teleteaching (83±0,11). There is a positive and significant correlation between practice time and total score in the group with teleteaching. Conclusion Real-time teleteaching (digital presence teaching) has a significant influence on the psychomotor learning curves of students. A checklist-based evaluation is indispensable for establishing a digital assessment of psychomotor skills and for creating comparability between analog and digital teaching. Previous analyses showed that after the analog mirror course with 6 teaching units (45 min each) an average of 95.4 points was achieved. The total score achieved in digital teaching (86.1±0.09) is comparable to the score after 4 analog lessons (45 min each).