Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Who will be affected?
Readers: No access to all 28 journals. We recommend accessing our articles via PubMed Central
Authors: No access to the submission form or your user account.
Reviewers: No access to your user account. Please download manuscripts you are reviewing for offline reading before Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 7:00 PM.
Editors: No access to your user account to assign reviewers or make decisions.
Copyeditors: No access to user account. Please download manuscripts you are copyediting before Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 7:00 PM.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A blended learning course on the diagnostics of mental disorders: multicenter cluster randomized non-inferiority trial
Gabriel Bonnin;
Svea Kröber;
Silvia Schneider;
Jürgen Margraf;
Verena Pflug;
Alexander L. Gerlach;
Timo Slotta;
Hanna Christiansen;
Björn Albrecht;
Mira-Lynn Chavanon;
Gerrit Hirschfeld;
Tina In-Albon;
Meinald T. Thielsch;
Ruth von Brachel
ABSTRACT
Background:
Clinical diagnoses determine if and how therapists treat their patients. As misdiagnoses can have severe adverse effects, disseminating evidence-based diagnostic skills into clinical practice is highly important.
Objective:
Therefore, we developed and evaluated a blended learning course in a multicenter cluster randomized trial.
Methods:
Undergraduate psychology students (N=350) enrolled in eighteen university courses at three universities. The courses were randomly assigned to blended learning or traditional synchronous teaching. The primary outcome was the participants’ performance in a clinical diagnostic interview after the courses, secondary outcomes were diagnostic knowledge and participants’ reactions to the courses. All outcomes were analyzed on the individual participant level using non-inferiority testing.
Results:
Compared to the synchronous course (74.6% pass rate), participation in the blended learning course (89.0% pass rate) increased the likelihood of successfully passing the behavioral test, OR=2.77 (95% CI [1.55, 5.13]), indicating not only non-inferiority, but superiority of the blended learning course. Furthermore, participants in the blended learning course did not perform worse than participants in the synchronous course on the diagnostic knowledge test and several reaction measures.
Conclusions:
Blended learning can help to improve the diagnostic skills and knowledge of (future) clinicians and thus make an important contribution to improving mental health care. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05294094
Citation
Please cite as:
Bonnin G, Kröber S, Schneider S, Margraf J, Pflug V, Gerlach AL, Slotta T, Christiansen H, Albrecht B, Chavanon ML, Hirschfeld G, In-Albon T, Thielsch MT, von Brachel R
A Blended Learning Course on the Diagnostics of Mental Disorders: Multicenter Cluster Randomized Noninferiority Trial