Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 28, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 30, 2020
Development of a rubric to rate the value of health education mobile apps to enhance student learning
ABSTRACT
Background:
To realize the potential for mobile learning in clinical skills acquisition, medical students and their teachers need the ability to evaluate the usefulness of an app for supporting learning of clinical skills.
Objective:
The objective of this research was to develop a rubric that can be used by staff to rate the usefulness of a mobile app for student just-in-time learning.
Methods:
Using the literature, we developed a list of potential criteria for evaluation of app usefulness. We then ran a nominal group using students to refine the list to those deemed most relevant by our target audience of learners. The refined list was organized into thematic categories and the initial rubric, Mobile App Rubric for Usefulness in Learning (MARUL, version 1) developed. iOS and Android app stores were searched for apps that met our inclusion criteria. We focused our app search on apps for clinical skills. After training the two reviewers using one excluded app, and refinement of the item descriptions (version 2), the reviewers reviewed an initial random sample of ten included apps, five for each mobile operating system. Initial inter-item and inter-rater analysis was used, along with discussion with the reviewers, to further refine the MARUL to a version 3. The reviewers then completed a review of the full set of 41 included clinical skills mobile apps and a second round of inter-item and inter-rater reliability testing was performed. This led to further refinement to version 4 of the MARUL.
Results:
Students identified 28 items (from an initial set of 144 possible items) during the nominal group phase and these were grouped into four categories: teaching and learning; user-centered; professional; and usability. Testing and refinement with reviewers reduced the list to 26 items. Inter-rater reliability for the MARUL was excellent (alpha = 0.96), and the interrater reliability as measured by the intraclass correlation coefficient was good (ICC = 0.66).
Conclusions:
The MARUL offers a fast and user-friendly method for teachers to select useful apps for just-in-time learning.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.