CRADLE Seminar Series: Joanna Tai
15 August 2016
On 9 August 2016, CRADLE hosted a seminar by Dr. Joanna Tai, ‘Peer Assisted Learning: Opportunities and Benefits for Clinical Medical Education’. This seminar provided an overview of the literature relating to peer-assisted learning and evaluative judgement, presented Dr. Tai’s doctoral research findings on peer learning in clinical medical education, and suggested strategies and techniques to develop both peer-assisted learning and evaluative judgement capacity.
Involving peers in learning has been shown to be useful in creating supportive learning environments and assisting students in better understanding concepts, as ‘to teach is to learn twice’. Dr. Tai discussed the ethnographic component of her doctoral research, which enabled her to investigate in depth how and what types of successful peer-assisted learning occurred during undergraduate medical students’ clinical placements.
Dr. Tai also reported on the findings of her research, in particular the role of peers in developing students’ evaluative judgement during their clinical placements. She found that, rather than simply providing moral support to one another, students observed each other and gave each other feedback. Through this process, students were able to comprehend a range of performance standards and practice making judgements of performance in relation to standards. Students report this to be a key aspect of learning with and from their peers.
Dr. Tai is a Research Fellow at CRADLE. In 2015, she completed her PhD, ‘Peer assisted learning in clinical medical education: a mixed methods study’, which she undertook at Health Professions Education and Educational Research (HealthPEER) at Monash University. She has published peer-reviewed papers on a range of health professions education topics, and has presented at both national and international conferences. Her research interests include peer-assisted learning, developing the capacity for evaluative judgement, student perspectives on learning, and research synthesis.
