Employing Collaborative Design Thinking To Encourage Midwifery Students To Suspend Their Disbelief During Simulated Clinical Performance

Simulation is an increasingly popular technology-enhanced learning methodology being employed across contemporary healthcare education. Simulation is a particularly favoured form of pedagogic activity in midwifery education, as it is seen as providing students with opportunities for enhanced safety, situational and temporal control, as well as a means of mimicking common and rare real-world scenarios. Although simulation is seen as providing numerous motivational qualities, research indicates that undergraduate midwifery students find it difficult to learn due to an inability to suspend their disbelief during performance. This presentation will discuss the challenges that midwifery students face with regards to suspending their disbelief during simulated clinical activity and how this incredulity to immersing oneself in roleplay can hinder their learning. This presentation will conclude with a discussion about an Inter-School project that was set up to not only encourage midwifery students to collaboratively design strategies to suspend their disbelief during simulated clinical performance, but tasked them to development an educational app that would motivationally instruct the wider student population in applying these strategies to their own learning.

Keywords: collaboration, role playing, ARCS Motivational Model, learning technology, simulation, midwifery, clinical performance