Since medical education programs in Korea and Japan seem to mutually influence each other, this review article provides a history of Japanese medical education, focusing on the way in which it influenced and was influenced by Korean medical education. In the late 19th century, the University of Tokyo established the core medical school, disseminating its scholarship and system to other medical schools. In the early 20th century, the balance between the quality and quantity of medical education became a new issue; in response, Japan developed different levels of medical school, ranging from imperial universities to medical colleges and medical vocational schools. After World War II, all of Japan’s medical schools became part of the university system, which was heavily regulated by the Ministry of Education (MOE) Standard for the Establishment of Universities. In 1991, MOE deregulated the Standard; since 2000, several new systems have been established to regulate medical schools. These new approaches have included the Model Core Curriculum, 2-year mandatory postgraduate training, and a medical education accreditation system. Currently, most medical schools are nervous, as a result of tighter regulatory systems that include an accreditation system for undergraduate education and a specialty training system for postgraduate education.
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Methods A total of 68 video recordings of routine check-up OSCEs were included. A checklist for NVC was developed that included seven nonverbal factors in a mute state (NVM) and four nonverbal factors in speech (NVS), and one point was assigned to each factor. The scores for history taking, PPI, NVM, and NVS were compared, and correlations of each score were evaluated.
Results Students with adequate facial expressions, accorded speech rate and voice volume, adequately matched voice tone, and few or no moments of unnecessary silence showed better PPI scores. The PPI score was correlated with history taking and the NVS score, but not the NVM score.
Conclusion Our results suggest that NVS may be more influential to PPI during OSCEs than NVM. Communication teachers should help students to be better prepared to use both NVS and NVM properly.
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Purpose This study was to explore the relationship between clinical performance examination (CPX) achievement and epistemological beliefs to investigate the potentials of epistemological beliefs in ill-structured medical problem solving tasks.
Methods We administered the epistemological beliefs questionnaire (EBQ) to fourth-year medical students and correlated the results with their CPX scores. The EBQ comprised 61 items reflecting five belief systems: certainty of knowledge, source of knowledge, rigidity of learning, ability to learn, and speed of knowledge acquisition. The CPX included scores for history taking, physical examination, and patient-physician interaction.
Results The higher epistemological beliefs group obtained significantly higher scores on the CPX with regard to history taking and patient-physician interaction. The epistemological beliefs scores on certainty of knowledge and source of knowledge were significantly positively correlated with patient-physician interaction. The epistemological beliefs scores for ability to learn were significantly positively correlated with those for history taking, physical examination, and patient-physician interaction.
Conclusion Students with more sophisticated and advanced epistemological beliefs stances used more comprehensive and varied approaches in the patient-physician interaction. Therefore, educational efforts that encourage discussions pertaining to epistemological views should be considered to improve clinical reasoning and problem-solving competence in the clinic setting.
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