Theoretical Foundations of Learning Through Simulation

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Health care simulation is a powerful educational tool to help facilitate learning for clinicians and change their practice to improve patient outcomes and safety. To promote effective life-long learning through simulation, the educator needs to consider individuals, their experiences, and their environments. Effective education of adults through simulation requires a sound understanding of both adult learning theory and experiential learning. This review article provides a framework for developing and facilitating simulation courses, founded upon empiric and theoretic research in adult and experiential learning. Specifically, this article provides a theoretic foundation for using simulation to change practice to improve patient outcomes and safety.

Section snippets

Individual

The motto for pediatric medicine is ‘children are not small adults,’ but rather, children have unique anatomic, physiological, immunologic, and developmental differences. Similarly, ‘adult education is not the same as childhood education.’ The differences have led to 2 distinct educational approaches to teaching and learning: pedagogy, the teaching of children and andragogy, the teaching of adults.10 Andragogy is not simply working with learners older than 18 years of age; it requires an

Experiences

Experiences, either real or simulated, are simply catalysts for learning: the actual learning does not occur during the experience itself, but rather during the debriefing that follows. A debriefing is a discussion that occurs immediately following the simulation experience during which educators and learners can reflect together to analyze individual and group performance. Experiences provide an opportunity for this reflection during which individuals can evaluate, refine and enhance the

Environment

Educators must consider the learning environment and the larger clinical environment in which students regularly practice to promote sustained change. The environment for learning can either support or undermine the ability to apply new knowledge in daily practice.5, 9 For learning to be effective, the environment must include skilled mentors to provide effective feedback and support change for life-long learning. Learners need mentors to help make sense of their experiences. Mentors are both

Conclusions

Healthcare simulation is a powerful educational tool to help facilitate learning for clinicians and change in practice to improve patient outcomes and safety. To promote effective life-long learning through simulation, the educator needs to consider individuals, their experiences and their environments. Effective education must be delivered along a continuum, from simulation to the bedside, where each experience is seen as a problem to be solved or an opportunity to learn. Simulations should

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