J . R . Neal et al .: J Extra Corpor Technol 2024 , 56 , 71 – 76 75
before these changes were implemented . Since instituting the use of reflection and self-evaluation 4 years ago , we feel it has reduced the number of repetitive student issues during cases . Certainly , the ability to gather data would be something that could be done in the future to be able to tease out the differences in perfusion student learning . At this time it was seen as a delay and an obstacle to getting the general information out to the perfusion community at large . This would be a limitation of this paper .
Many of these changes that were made are minor to the impact of perfusion groups but have the potential to lead to major improvements to the ability of preceptors to better impact the knowledge growth of students rotating at their institution . One of the goals that we had was to make students turn into new graduate perfusionists with the ability to reflect and evaluate at the moment when patients need care instead of evaluating and reflecting after the case has been completed .
In a large academic center , the ability of all preceptors to be updated on a particular student ’ s abilities is limited . By creating a simple system to identify the current ability of a student , preceptors have a better understanding of the student ’ s abilities . Three levels were selected with the belief that preceptors would be likely to remember the differences between levels and where a student is within the level system . This is compared to an overall more complex five to ten-level approach where preceptors would lose the ability to remember the major differences between levels . Another benefit of the level system is that it gives additional goals and milestones for the students to target and reach . Overall response from students over the years has been positive to student levels and they have genuinely been excited as they move up and change levels . While a smaller institution might have fewer students and individual preceptors working more frequently with a specific student . The ability to have additional targets and goals for students to reach would still make this technique applicable for even smaller institutions to try .
Providing the students with information and requesting them to perform reflective practices and self-evaluation on their own time takes a certain amount of trust from the preceptors and program director that the students will participate . Currently , we do not keep track or have the students record this time , although with discussions of level increases it is often referenced to ask how things are going with these reflections and evaluations . Certainly , a more formal process in this area could be designed if an institution desired or didactic program required this . Previous studies , in nursing , show students do adapt to student-centered learning and test scores improved with this approach [ 21 ].
Once a student graduates and starts independently practicing , the ability for realistic grading of their performance by others diminishes . If a student never developed the ability to self-evaluate their performance , it is a skill that would be more difficult to implement at this point . By allowing students the ability to grade themselves first before the preceptor the preceptor can then see what the student is thinking about their progress . The preceptor can then offer more meaningful insights on where the student ’ s practice needs to improve . This could prevent students from being too critical of their performance or from being overly confident of their abilities .
Having incorporated student-centered learning into our practice including areas of EBP , PBL , self-evaluation , and self-reflection we feel that this has offered the students a more meaningful rotation and given them the tools to become lifelong reflecting and evaluating perfusionists that use EBP . Hopefully , some of these students with experience of their own will now be able to teach new students and continue this line of processing to future perfusion students for the betterment of patient care [ 22 ].
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the past and current perfusion preceptors at our institution for the many years of dedicated educational assistance that has been offered to perfusion students . We would also like to acknowledge and thank the other allied health staff and physicians whose patience has made it possible for students to take additional time to master the techniques of perfusion .
Funding
We have no funding to declare for the effort put into this publication .
Conflict of interest
We have no conflict of interest to report for the authoring of this publication .
Data availability statement
No data was analyzed in this paper . Given this , we do not have a repository of data for supplementary material to acknowledge .
Author contribution statement
James is the current Perfusion Clinical Program Director ; he conceptualized these student-centered processes at the request of the hospital ’ s school of health science to bring student-centered learning into perfusion clinical rotations . Caitlin as perfusion supervisor assisted with expanding the preceptor group , helping to onboard students , and reviewing and editing this paper . Clint is the newly named Perfusion Clinical Program Director and has assisted with onboarding students and with reviewing and edits to this paper .
Ethics approval
No formal research was implemented with regard to this paper , as such no ethical declarations are needed to be declared .
References
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5 . Gibbs G . Learning by doing : a guide to teaching and learning methods , geography discipline network . UK : Further Education Unit at Oxford Polytechnic , 2001 .