Project Summary

Title: Ensuring Quality SP Feedback in Medical Simulations: a FEA Plan Presentation

 

Context: A final project for course IDE 712: Analysis for Human Performance Technology Decisions

 

Author(s): Amber A. Walton

 

IDD&E Competency: Planning and Analysis (6) Conduct a needs assessment in order to recommend appropriate design solutions and strategies.

 

Reflection/Self-Assessment:

Overview

 This final course project sought to create a comprehensive plan for conducting an analysis, including defining and defending all of the phases of a Front End Analysis (FEA)/Needs Assessment and subsequent project proposal plan for a “problem” and “context,” either in a real or an imaginary context of our choice.  The goals of the project were to:

1. Identify a significant human performance-oriented problem.

2. Clarify this problem: e.g., whose problem? How big/frequent is this problem? Who/what is affected?

3. Justify the importance of solving this problem.

4. Hypothesize possible causes using one of the FEA models.

5. Select appropriate approaches, procedures and instrumentation for the solutions.

6. Propose the best solution(s) with justifications.

​

Strengths

This topic, high-quality SP feedback, is vitally important in the field of Simulated Participant Education and is not well represented in the medical or educational literature, thus this topic is both timely and important.  I was eager to be as thorough as possible in every aspect of the project and I am happy with the comprehensiveness of the end product.  Since we were given flexibility to choose whether the context was real or imaginary, I was able to draw from real previous research I had conducted on this topic and imagine the data that I would find if the FEA plan had been conducted in full.  Making sense of this data to suggest potential causes and solutions was a challenge, but ultimately gave me excellent practice at conducting a formal analysis project both within SP Education and in a multitude of other fields and contexts.

 

Opportunities

Creating imaginary data was both too convenient and challenging.  I recognize that in a real context, the data will be more diverse and harder to classify.  Deciding which question belonged in each of the BEM chart fields was difficult, as there was some overlap and arguments could be made for a question’s inclusion elsewhere.  Since I was the sole analyst for this project, I could make my own decision for how to organize and code the analysis questions and resulting answers; this process will become more challenging with other team members and coworkers.  On the other hand, additional analysis team members could help to provide a different perspective and rich collaboration of ideas, ultimately resulting in a more robust end product.