The research team, led by Thao Van Vi of the East Asia University of Technology in Hanoi together with colleagues from Hanoi National University of Education, the University of Danang, and Vinh University, set out to test a proposition that sounds almost paradoxical: that a nineteenth-century philosophical framework could serve as a training ground for twenty-first-century workplace competencies. Their survey-based study measured how students perceived the philosophy course and whether those perceptions correlated with self-reported soft skill development, using regression analysis to isolate which factors mattered most.

The headline finding is striking in its simplicity. Students’ positive perceptions of the philosophy course had the strongest statistical impact on their soft skills development of any factor examined. In other words, when students engaged with the material rather than merely enduring it, the course appeared to function as a genuine skills incubator. The authors argue that this effect is not automatic but conditional: the benefits emerge primarily when the philosophy is taught through interactive methods and connected to practical, real-world problems rather than delivered as rote memorization of doctrine.

Why would dialectical materialism and historical materialism build communication and teamwork skills? The mechanism, according to the study’s theoretical framework, lies in the structure of philosophical reasoning itself. Marxist-Leninist philosophy trains students to analyze contradictions, examine phenomena in their interconnections, and trace how opposing forces interact to produce change. These are, in essence, the cognitive operations underlying problem-solving: identifying tensions in a situation, weighing competing explanations, and synthesizing a coherent resolution. When classroom discussion requires students to defend an analysis of social phenomena, they practice argumentation, listening, and collaborative reasoning simultaneously.

The study situates itself within a substantial body of evidence on the economic value of soft skills. Economists including James Heckman have demonstrated that character and interpersonal skills predict labor market outcomes at least as strongly as cognitive test scores, and surveys of executives routinely place communication, teamwork, and adaptability at the top of hiring priorities. In Vietnam, where the economy is deeply integrated into global supply chains and graduates compete in an increasingly internationalized labor market, the stakes of soft skills development are particularly high. Universities have responded with dedicated employability programs, but the new research suggests that existing mandatory coursework may be an underused resource.

Methodologically, the researchers administered a structured questionnaire to 527 students drawn from six Vietnamese universities, using Likert-scale items to gauge both perceptions of the philosophy course and self-assessed competencies across the four target skill domains. The team validated their instruments through standard psychometric procedures, including factor analysis to confirm that the measured constructs were statistically distinct, and applied multiple regression to determine the relative contribution of course perceptions to skills outcomes while controlling for other variables. The authors report that the data supporting the study’s conclusions are fully provided in the article, with additional data available on reasonable request.

The findings align with a growing Vietnamese literature on critical thinking in higher education. Prior studies at the University of Danang and Ho Chi Minh City Open University have explored how philosophy teaching can cultivate creative and critical reasoning, while other Vietnamese research has documented persistent gaps between students’ critical thinking capacities and the demands of argumentative writing and professional practice. The new study extends this work by quantifying the relationship between a specific mandatory course and a broad portfolio of soft skills, rather than focusing on critical thinking alone.

The pedagogical implications are where the research becomes most actionable. The authors contend that the traditional lecture-heavy format common in philosophy courses across Vietnam risks squandering the subject’s potential. Interactive approaches, including structured debate, case-based discussion, and group projects that apply dialectical analysis to contemporary social and economic questions, appear to be the pathway through which the course translates theory into transferable skills. This mirrors international findings in the scholarship of teaching and learning, which consistently show that active learning formats outperform passive transmission for developing higher-order reasoning and interpersonal competencies.

There are, of course, limits to what a cross-sectional survey can establish. The study measures perceptions and self-reports rather than independently assessed skill performance, and correlation through regression analysis cannot fully rule out the possibility that students who already possess stronger soft skills simply view their philosophy courses more favorably. Longitudinal designs tracking students from enrollment through graduation, and employer evaluations of graduate performance, would be needed to confirm the causal pathway the authors propose. The research ethics were validated by the Department of Scientific Research at the East Asia University of Technology, with anonymous participation and voluntary withdrawal guaranteed for all respondents.

Even with those caveats, the study carries a provocative message for educators well beyond Vietnam. It suggests that the content of a curriculum matters less than how it is taught, and that even courses perceived as ideological or antiquated can become engines of transferable competence when instructors connect abstract frameworks to lived experience. As universities worldwide scramble to embed employability skills across their programs, the Vietnamese case offers a reminder that the most unlikely courses may already be teaching exactly what the modern workplace demands, provided students are invited to think rather than merely memorize.

Subject of Research: The role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy education in developing soft skills among Vietnamese university students

Article Title: Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students

Article References: Tuyet, M. T., Hai, H. T., Thi, M. A. N. T. K., & Van Vi, T. (2026). Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 512. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Keywords: Marxist-Leninist philosophy, soft skills, critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, problem-solving, Vietnamese higher education, regression analysis, employability, philosophy of education, interactive teaching, survey research

The Student Health Service, known in France as the Service Sanitaire, occupies a unique position in the landscape of health professional education. Introduced as a compulsory component of French health curricula, it requires students from six distinct disciplines to work side by side on prevention projects aimed at communities, schools, and other beneficiary populations. According to the study’s authors, it is the only mandatory and universal interprofessional training experience embedded in French health education. That universality makes it an unusually powerful natural laboratory: unlike voluntary electives or single-institution pilots, the program reaches essentially every health student in a given region, allowing researchers to assess skill development across an entire cohort rather than a self-selected sample of enthusiasts.

To quantify the change, the research team turned to a validated instrument called the Interprofessional Collaborative Competency Attainment Survey, or ICCAS. The tool asks respondents to rate their own competence across the domains of interprofessional collaboration, including roles and responsibilities, teamwork, communication, and collaborative patient- or client-centered practice. The French version was used with written permission from Professor Douglas Archibald, with a minor contextual adaptation: references to the patient or family were reworded to refer to the beneficiary of the preventive action, matching the prevention-focused mission of the Student Health Service. The survey uses a seven-point scale, and the study’s primary endpoint was the change in mean score between a retrospective pre-program rating and a post-program rating collected at the same time.

That retrospective pre-post design deserves a technical note, because it is both the study’s methodological strength and a source of interpretive caution. Rather than asking students to rate their skills before the program and then again afterward, the researchers collected both the before and after ratings simultaneously once the program was complete. This approach, widely used in educational research, is thought to reduce response-shift bias, the phenomenon in which participants’ internal standards shift during an intervention, making their earlier self-assessments incomparable with later ones. By anchoring both judgments to a common frame of reference at a single moment, the retrospective design attempts to isolate genuine perceived growth from mere changes in how students understand the rating scale itself.

The scale of the data collection was ambitious. All 1,141 students completing their Student Health Service during the 2024–2025 academic year in the departments of Maine-et-Loire, Mayenne, and Sarthe were eligible. Of these, 943 received the questionnaire, 638 responded, and 553 questionnaires met the predefined completion criterion and entered the final analysis. The results were striking in their consistency. The mean ICCAS score rose from 5.81 before the program to 6.37 afterward, a statistically significant mean improvement of 0.55 points with a p-value below 0.001. In practical terms, students moved from a self-assessment comfortably above the scale’s midpoint to one approaching its upper range, and every one of the ICCAS domains showed significant improvement.

The distribution of individual responses adds texture to the headline numbers. A decisive majority, 86.6 percent of students, reported an improvement in their self-perceived interprofessional skills. A small fraction, 9.9 percent, reported no change, and 3.4 percent actually reported a decrease. The researchers also ran exploratory analyses to see whether the size of the gain varied by field of study, by department, or by the prevention topic students worked on. No significant differences emerged, although the authors caution that some subgroups were small, limiting the statistical power of those comparisons. The apparent uniformity of benefit across professions is itself notable: it suggests the program’s effect is not driven by one discipline’s curriculum or one region’s implementation but appears to operate broadly across the interprofessional mix.

One of the study’s most intriguing findings came from its sensitivity analysis, which compared paper-based questionnaires with digital ones. Students who completed the survey on paper reported a mean improvement of 0.586 points, while those using the digital format reported a mean gain of only 0.251 points, a difference that was itself statistically significant at p below 0.001. The authors do not overinterpret this gap, but it raises genuine methodological questions for anyone designing self-assessment research. Response formats can influence how people recall and evaluate their own past states, and the nearly threefold difference between modalities suggests that survey delivery is not a neutral technical choice. Future evaluations of interprofessional education may need to account for, or standardize, the medium through which self-perception is measured.

Why does a mandatory prevention placement move the needle on collaboration skills at all? The theoretical answer lies in the architecture of interprofessional education itself. Decades of research have argued that health professions students learn in silos, absorbing the norms, vocabularies, and hierarchies of their own discipline while rarely practicing the negotiation of roles that real clinical teamwork demands. The Student Health Service forces that negotiation early. Because prevention projects require students to define who does what, communicate across professional boundaries, and center the needs of a shared beneficiary, they create authentic opportunities to exercise exactly the competencies the ICCAS measures. The study’s findings are consistent with the idea that collaborative competence is not an abstract attitude but a practical skill that develops through structured, repeated, real-world interaction with other professions.

The implications extend beyond France. Health systems globally face workforce shortages, rising chronic disease burdens, and mounting evidence that fragmented care harms patients, all of which have pushed interprofessional education to the top of curricular reform agendas. Yet rigorous evaluations of mandatory, large-scale interprofessional programs remain scarce, partly because few countries have made such training universal. The Angers study, covering six professions across three departments in a single academic year, provides a template for how such evaluations can be conducted: a validated self-assessment instrument, a retrospective pre-post design, and a completion criterion applied before analysis. Its conclusion that the program strengthened interprofessional training in French health curricula gives policymakers empirical support for maintaining and expanding the model.

The authors are careful about the limits of what self-report can show. Self-perceived competence is not the same as objectively measured competence, and students may overestimate or underestimate their actual collaborative abilities. The study’s own recommendation points the way forward: further research should explore the relationship between self-perceived and objectively measured interprofessional competencies, ideally through observational measures, standardized assessments, or longitudinal follow-up into professional practice. There is also the question of durability, whether gains measured immediately after the program persist once students enter clinical rotations and, eventually, the workforce. Still, the core message stands. When a thousand-plus students across medicine, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy, and the therapies were required to collaborate on real prevention work, nearly nine in ten came away believing they had become better team members, and the numbers behind that belief were statistically robust. For a field long criticized for teaching teamwork in lecture halls, that is evidence worth taking seriously.

Subject of Research: Changes in self-perceived interprofessional collaborative skills among health students after a mandatory student health service program

Article Title: Changes in students’ self-perceived interprofessional collaborative skills following participation in the student health service program

Article References: Donat, T., De Roquefeuil, E., Busson, A., Baglin, I., Poiroux, L., Ramond-Roquin, A., Ammi, M., & Levaillant, M. (2026). Changes in students’ self-perceived interprofessional collaborative skills following participation in the student health service program. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10479-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10479-1

Keywords: interprofessional education, interprofessional collaboration, Student Health Service, ICCAS, self-assessment, health professions students, medical education, teamwork, preventive care, France, BMC Medical Education, curriculum evaluation

The research team, led by Bürge Atılgan of Ankara Training and Research Hospital and Sevgi Turan of ADA University in Baku, conducted the study across five universities in Ankara. Their goal was deliberately broad: rather than measuring collaboration with surveys and scales, they wanted to understand how educators and students experience and interpret it in their own words. Qualitative descriptive methodology was chosen precisely because the field needed a richer, more textured account of what collaboration means on the ground in Turkish health professions education, where such in-depth evidence has been scarce.

The study design was substantial. Forty-seven faculty members took part in semi-structured individual interviews, while thirty-five final-year students participated in five profession-specific focus groups. Participants were recruited from five disciplines: medicine, nursing, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, pharmacy, and nutrition and dietetics. Every interview was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the researchers analysed the transcripts using qualitative content analysis, a systematic method for identifying patterns and themes within textual data. Reporting followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, a thirty-two-item checklist designed to make qualitative studies transparent and replicable. Ethical approval came from the Hacettepe University Ethics Committee, with institutional permissions from every participating university, and all participants gave informed consent.

From the analysis, four major themes emerged. The first framed collaborative practice as a requirement for patient-centred care. Participants across all professions agreed that safe, coordinated and holistic treatment depends on professionals working together rather than in parallel silos. A patient with complex needs—say, an older adult recovering from a stroke—requires physicians to diagnose, nurses to monitor, physiotherapists to restore mobility, pharmacists to manage medication interactions and dietitians to address nutrition. When these professionals communicate poorly, care fragments; when they collaborate, outcomes improve. The participants saw this not as an idealistic aspiration but as a practical necessity of contemporary medicine.

The second theme concerned understanding professional roles and boundaries. Participants emphasised that effective teamwork is impossible without role clarity: each team member must know not only what their own responsibilities are, but what their colleagues are trained and authorised to do. Misunderstandings about scope of practice breed duplication, gaps in care and mistrust. The researchers found that both faculty members and students recognised the importance of mutual respect alongside role clarity, but that students often lacked structured opportunities to learn what other professions actually do—a gap that leaves them to form impressions through incidental contact, rumour or stereotype.

The third theme identified communication, hierarchy and prejudice as the principal barriers to teamwork. This is where the study becomes most pointed. Participants described steep professional hierarchies in which the voice of the physician traditionally carries the most weight, and in which other professionals may hesitate to speak up even when they have crucial information. Prejudice between professions—unflattering assumptions about what another discipline contributes—further corrodes trust. These barriers are not unique to Türkiye; international literature on interprofessional collaboration has long documented similar dynamics. But the study makes clear that students experience these tensions directly during clinical placements, and that unaddressed hierarchy in training environments risks reproducing itself in the next generation of practitioners.

The fourth theme centred on educational and institutional contexts for collaboration. Here the two participant groups diverged in revealing ways. Although faculty members and students raised many of the same issues, they approached them from different positions. Students focused mainly on learning, participation, communication and respect—their immediate experience of being trained and of interacting with other professions. Faculty members, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on professional identity, institutional structures and the practical conditions required for implementation. In other words, students asked how they could learn to collaborate, while educators asked what curricular time, faculty development and administrative support would be needed to make such learning possible at scale.

That divergence matters for policy. Interprofessional education—the deliberate arrangement of students from two or more professions to learn together—has been championed by the World Health Organization and the Interprofessional Education Collaborative as a strategy for building collaborative practice. Yet embedding it in a curriculum is institutionally demanding. It requires synchronised timetables across faculties, shared learning activities with genuine clinical relevance, assessment methods that reward teamwork, and faculty who can model collaborative behaviour in front of students. The study’s participants made clear that faculty role modelling is a powerful force: students learn as much from watching how their teachers interact with other professionals as from any formal lecture on teamwork.

The authors’ conclusions are measured but firm. Faculty members and final-year students viewed collaborative practice and understanding of professional roles as important but insufficiently structured components of health professions education. They recommend that curricula provide early, repeated and interactive opportunities for students from different professions to learn together—early, because attitudes and stereotypes form quickly; repeated, because a single shared course cannot undo years of siloed training; and interactive, because collaboration is a skill practised, not memorised. They further call for faculty development programmes and institutional support to sustain collaborative learning and practice over time, recognising that individual enthusiasm cannot substitute for structural commitment.

The study was supported by the Hacettepe University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit under project number TDK-2020-18494, with the funder having no role in study design, data collection, analysis or interpretation. The authors declare no competing interests, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons licence. For a health system facing rising chronic disease, ageing populations and increasingly complex care pathways, the message resonates far beyond Ankara: the professionals of tomorrow will inevitably work in teams, and the education system must stop leaving teamwork to chance. Teaching students to collaborate deliberately, with clear roles and mutual respect, may prove as consequential to patient safety as any drug or device.

Subject of Research: Interprofessional collaboration and professional role perceptions in health professions education in Türkiye

Article Title: Faculty members’ and final-year students’ perspectives on interprofessional collaboration and professional roles: a qualitative study in Türkiye

Article References: Atılgan, B., & Turan, S. (2026). Faculty members’ and final-year students’ perspectives on interprofessional collaboration and professional roles: a qualitative study in Türkiye. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10512-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10512-3

Keywords: interprofessional collaboration, health professions education, teamwork, professional roles, qualitative research, medical education, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, nutrition and dietetics, Türkiye, curriculum

The study, published in BMC Medical Education, addresses a gap that has persisted despite the TEAM tool’s translation into multiple languages. The original instrument evaluates eleven observable behaviors during emergency team performance, covering domains such as leadership and team cooperation, along with global ratings of team performance and the observer’s overall impression. Until now, no Simplified Chinese version had been formally validated, which meant that emergency departments in mainland China lacked a linguistically and culturally equivalent instrument for structured observation and feedback during training in trauma and resuscitation scenarios.

The translation process followed established cross-cultural adaptation guidelines, a pipeline designed to ensure that a questionnaire means the same thing in a new language as it did in the original. The researchers began with independent forward translations of the scale into Simplified Chinese, then synthesized those versions into a single draft. That draft was back-translated into English by translators blinded to the original instrument, allowing the team to detect any drift in meaning. A multidisciplinary panel of authors, doctors, nurses, and English-language specialists then reviewed the versions side by side, reconciling discrepancies in wording until the Chinese text captured the intent of every item.

Crucially, the team did not stop at linguistic equivalence. They collaborated directly with the original authors of the TEAM questionnaire to maintain conceptual equivalence, and they assessed cultural relevance through Delphi rounds and cognitive interviews with domain experts. Delphi methods involve iterative rounds of structured expert consultation, in which panelists rate and comment on each item until consensus emerges. Cognitive interviews probe whether respondents understand an item the way its authors intended, surfacing ambiguities that a literal translation would never reveal. Together, these steps ensured that the Chinese wording resonated with the clinical realities and communication norms of Chinese emergency teams rather than simply mirroring English phrasing.

The psychometric evaluation centered on video-based assessment. Two trained raters independently scored video recordings of 46 emergency team scenarios involving severe trauma or resuscitation, producing 46 pairs of ratings and 92 individual ratings in total. Using video rather than live observation allowed both raters to see identical performances, isolating the agreement between raters from the noise of real-time perspective differences. The study received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and written informed consent was obtained from participating healthcare professionals and from patients or their legally authorized representatives for the research use of recordings.

The results provide strong preliminary support for the new version. Expert assessment of content validity yielded a scale-level content validity index average of 0.98, remarkably close to the perfect score of 1.0, indicating near-unanimous expert agreement that the eleven behavioral items remain relevant and clear in Chinese. The universal agreement index, which is stricter because it requires every expert to rate an item as relevant, stood at 0.82, still comfortably above commonly accepted thresholds. These figures suggest that the adaptation preserved the substance of the original instrument while making it culturally natural for Chinese clinicians.

Internal consistency, which measures how coherently the items hang together as a single scale, was good, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.896. This statistic ranges from zero to one, and values above 0.9 are often considered excellent, though excessively high values can signal redundant items. Item-total correlations, which indicate how strongly each item relates to the overall score, ranged from 0.547 to 0.764, meaning every behavioral item contributed meaningfully to the measurement of the underlying construct. No item behaved as an outlier or dragged down the scale’s coherence, an encouraging sign that the translated items measure a unified dimension of team performance.

Inter-rater reliability, arguably the most important property for an observational rating tool, was also strong. The average-measure intraclass correlation coefficient for the total score across the eleven behavioral items was 0.902, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.836 to 0.938. An ICC of that magnitude indicates that two independent trained observers watching the same resuscitation would arrive at very similar assessments of team performance, which is exactly what a tool intended for feedback and training requires. At the level of individual items, average-measure ICCs ranged from 0.553 to 0.849, a more varied picture suggesting that some specific behaviors, such as those that are harder to observe or more context-dependent, may be somewhat more challenging to rate consistently than the scale as a whole.

The analysis of floor and ceiling effects revealed a pattern worth noting. No item showed a floor effect, meaning raters did not cluster scores at the bottom of the scale even for weaker team performances. However, six items showed ceiling effects ranging from 15.22 percent to 26.09 percent, indicating that a meaningful share of the observed teams received the maximum rating on those behaviors. Ceiling effects can compress the range of scores at the top end and reduce the instrument’s sensitivity to differences among high-performing teams. The authors suggest that future research should examine the structural validity and responsiveness of the Simplified Chinese version, as well as its performance across other clinical settings, to determine whether the ceiling pattern persists and how best to address it.

The practical implications extend well beyond psychometrics. Structured assessment tools like TEAM are the backbone of simulation-based training in emergency medicine, giving instructors an objective framework for debriefing after mock codes and trauma drills. A validated Simplified Chinese version means that Chinese emergency departments, simulation centers, and nursing schools can now deliver feedback grounded in an instrument whose measurement properties have been demonstrated in their own language and cultural context. It also enables Chinese teams to participate in international research comparing team performance across countries, since scores from the adapted version can be interpreted against the same construct as the original. The researchers, led by Yukun Zhang of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine and Universiti Malaya, together with LiYoong Tang, MeiChan Chong, Shanshan Li, and Yuwei Wang, frame the work as a foundation rather than a finish line. The evidence they report covers content validity, internal consistency, and inter-rater reliability in trauma and resuscitation scenarios; broader claims about responsiveness to training interventions and generalizability to other acute care settings await further study. For now, the study stands as a careful example of how a measurement instrument crosses a linguistic border without losing its meaning, and as a practical gift to the clinicians who train the teams that respond when every second counts.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of a Simplified Chinese version of the Team Emergency Assessment Measure for emergency team performance

Article Title: Cross-cultural adaptation, translation, and psychometric evaluation of the simplified Chinese version of the Team Emergency Assessment Measure (TEAM)

Article References: Zhang, Y., Tang, L., Chong, M., Li, S., & Wang, Y. (2026). Cross-cultural adaptation, translation, and psychometric evaluation of the simplified Chinese version of the Team Emergency Assessment Measure (TEAM). BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10529-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10529-8

Keywords: TEAM questionnaire, non-technical skills, cross-cultural adaptation, psychometrics, emergency medicine, teamwork, resuscitation, trauma, inter-rater reliability, content validity, medical education, translation

The motivation stems from a fundamental tension in biomedical engineering education. The field spans an enormous breadth of science and engineering domains, from biomechanics to biomaterials to physiological systems, and medical technology evolves so rapidly that any fixed curriculum risks obsolescence. As the authors note, citing classic work by Jonassen and Hernandez-Serrano, novices in school are typically trained only on well-structured, contextualized problems, while problems in everyday and professional contexts are complex and ill-structured. Problem-based learning, or PBL, borrowed from medical education, addresses this gap by placing students in teams around open-ended, real-world challenges and asking them to construct knowledge themselves rather than receive it passively from a lecturer.

In a traditional PBL implementation, the facilitator is not a content expert dispensing answers but an expert learner who models effective strategies for inquiry and group dynamics. Facilitators probe student reasoning with questions such as: What is the evidence for your statement? Where did you find this information? How reliable is it? They promote deep engagement with the problem, support shared regulation and self-directed learning by encouraging students to recognize what they do not know, and cultivate productive group dynamics by monitoring interactions and validating contributions. The problem is that this role, done well, requires substantial time, effort and institutional buy-in, particularly at large research universities where a dedicated facilitator for every team in every course is logistically cumbersome.

The Virginia Tech solution was elegantly simple. Faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and clinicians were recruited as volunteer facilitators, each attending only one to three 75-minute class periods. Each class session was divided into three 20-minute facilitation periods, with three to five facilitators rotating among different student teams. Over a semester, each team experienced approximately six to eight total facilitation periods spread across the course’s open-ended problems. A week before their assigned session, facilitators received a summary guide of Barrows’ The Tutorial Process, the problem statement, deliverable descriptions, assessment rubrics and team rosters, a lightweight preparation package designed to minimize the burden while maximizing effectiveness.

The course itself, a three-credit requirement for the biomedical engineering major and minor, was redesigned around adapted frameworks from Newstetter and from Clyne and Billiar. Teams of four to five students, assembled using the validated CATME Team Maker tool, tackled an introductory reverse-engineering problem involving common medical devices such as pulse oximeters and blood glucose monitors, followed by two open-ended problems inspired by challenge areas identified by the National Institutes of Health, including pediatric device labeling, glioblastoma treatment and organ transplantation. One open-ended problem emphasized the engineering design process and experimental design; the other focused on mathematical modeling. Each problem unfolded through intermittent individual and team deliverables culminating in a final written and oral product, with mini-lectures on target skills such as reading scientific articles woven in between.

A crucial structural innovation was the Executive Summary. At the start of each facilitation period, one team member delivered a one-to-two-minute verbal briefing defining the problem, summarizing the team’s progress and outlining future plans. Facilitators scored this summary using a rubric assessing communication skills and overall team functioning. The researchers believe this mechanism passively enforced individual accountability and was one of the main drivers of the course’s success, since every student had to be prepared to explain and defend the team’s work at any moment. Team meeting minutes and CATME peer evaluations provided additional layers of accountability, though students rated the meeting minutes as the least helpful of these mechanisms.

The study collected data from the Fall 2020 offering with 53 students and 26 facilitators and the Spring 2021 offering with 71 students and 22 facilitators, both taught online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the team first gathered quantitative survey data and then followed up with open-ended questions analyzed thematically. The results were largely encouraging. Students rated their ability to collaborate effectively within a team highest, with a mean of 3.88 on a four-point scale, while ratings for evaluating and applying mathematical modeling and identifying safety and ethics committees were lower at 3.08, partly reflecting that those outcomes were tied to specific problems. Facilitators were similarly positive, with 88 and 95 percent rating teamwork and communication outcomes as good or excellent.

Perceptions of the rotating model itself revealed both enthusiasm and friction. Roughly 64 to 66 percent of students agreed that rotating facilitators contributed to their individual and team success, with mean agreement scores of 3.76 and 3.81 on a five-point scale. Yet a majority, 56.7 percent, also found the rotations challenging for their individual experience, and half found them challenging for their team, a reaction the authors attribute to unfamiliarity with non-traditional pedagogy. On the facilitator side, 88 percent agreed the rotational model benefited student learning, and 97.7 percent found the time commitment acceptable. Notably, despite the online format, 84 percent of students reported they could engage during Zoom-based facilitation sessions, and facilitators reported that students were often more willing to turn cameras on in small breakout groups than in the main virtual classroom.

Thematic analysis surfaced four key patterns: engagement, knowledge sharing, expectations and the value of rotating facilitation. Students appreciated facilitators who asked probing questions and shared specialized expertise, with one noting that different professors brought knowledge of FDA processes, vascularization and research tools. Facilitators valued meeting multiple teams and offering diverse perspectives, with one observing that more facilitators probing questions can breach the boundaries of a team’s knowledge in more places. The friction centered on mismatched expectations: some students encountered facilitators who seemed unprepared or whose guidance felt too high-level, while some facilitators found teams poorly prepared or Executive Summaries inconsistently delivered. The authors argue this transparency problem, how PBL is communicated to both students and facilitators, deserves far more research attention.

The implications reach beyond a single course. The study demonstrates feasibility rather than definitive effectiveness, lacking a concurrent comparison group and drawing participants from a single department during a pandemic-era online format. Still, the model offers a compelling template for institutions where staffing constraints have made rigorous PBL impractical, and the authors suggest future work should compare rotating and dedicated facilitator models directly, develop frameworks for selecting appropriate open-ended problems, and conduct longitudinal studies tracking how introductory PBL shapes professional skills across the curriculum. For a field that must prepare undergraduates for the relentless pace of medical technology, a facilitation model that trades semester-long commitments for a few well-prepared hours may be the pragmatic unlock that brings deep, active learning to the students who need it most.

Subject of Research: A rotating facilitator model for problem-based learning in an introductory biomedical engineering course

Article Title: Implementation of a Rotating Facilitator Model of Problem-Based Learning in an Introductory Biomedical Engineering Course

Article References: Chowdhury, T., Walker, L. B., Muelenaer, A., Arena, C. B., Murzi, H., & Arena, S. L. (2026). Implementation of a Rotating Facilitator Model of Problem-Based Learning in an Introductory Biomedical Engineering Course. Biomedical Engineering Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-026-00252-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43683-026-00252-7

Keywords: problem-based learning, biomedical engineering education, rotating facilitators, student engagement, engineering pedagogy, teamwork, facilitation, active learning, undergraduate education, mixed methods, Virginia Tech, curriculum design

The research, led by Julio Navío-Marco, Diego Ardura, and Arturo Galán of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid, was conducted within an Applied Statistics in Education course at a major hybrid university. Students were offered the option of tackling one of their assignments individually or in teams of two or three. After the term ended, the entire cohort was surveyed with an instrument designed specifically for the study, measuring perceived utility, anticipated difficulties, skills acquired, and—for those who chose teams—the demands of the experience and its contribution to building learning communities. The design was ex-post-facto, meaning the researchers analyzed choices and perceptions after the fact rather than manipulating conditions, and the survey was resent weekly until every student had responded.

The statistical machinery behind the study was substantial. Exploratory factor analyses confirmed that the survey’s scales were robust: the 13-item perceived utility scale explained nearly 65 percent of item variance with a reliability of 0.97 on McDonald’s omega, while the difficulty, skills, effort, and learning community scales all showed similarly strong psychometric properties. To compare perceptions across students, the team used repeated measures ANOVA with Greenhouse–Geisser corrections for violated sphericity, and effect sizes were estimated with eta-squared and Cohen’s d. But the most revealing analysis came from a decision tree algorithm called CHAID—Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector—which segmented students into groups based on the variables that best predicted whether they would choose teamwork again.

The first CHAID model, predicting which modality students actually chose for the assignment, classified 72.1 percent of the sample correctly. Its verdict was unambiguous: the single best predictor of choosing teamwork was whether students believed collaboration was necessary for their education. Students scoring above three on that item were far more likely to opt for a team. Among those who saw teamwork as less essential, the next fork was performance—those hoping to improve their results leaned toward group work—while students who neither valued teamwork for learning nor sought performance gains chose teams only when their schedules allowed it. In short, students who preferred working alone generally did not see collaborative tasks as essential, did not expect performance benefits, and had limited availability.

The perceived benefits that separated team players from solo workers were strikingly consistent. Students who chose groups believed teamwork would make them more efficient (d = 0.63), more engaged (d = 0.58), higher performing (d = 0.51), and more responsible for their own learning (d = 0.51), with motivation and the perceived indispensability of teamwork for their education showing similarly moderate effects. Across the whole sample, the highest-rated contributions were improvements in communication skills, the generation of new knowledge, meeting educational needs, getting to know peers, reducing the isolation of distance learning, and creating a learning community. On the skills side, only employability-oriented competencies showed a meaningful difference between the groups, with a moderate effect size of 0.48—a signal that students drawn to teamwork are, at least in part, investing in their professional futures.

The negative side of the ledger was dominated by practical friction. Scheduling and availability difficulties and uneven member involvement topped the list of anticipated problems, while communication challenges ranked lowest. Students who worked individually rated nearly every anticipated difficulty higher than their team-working peers, with the largest gaps involving remote communication (d = 0.34), lack of commitment (d = 0.35), and participation in meetings (d = 0.36). The researchers point to the persistent specter of the free rider—the teammate who coasts on others’ effort—as a key driver of distrust, echoing a long line of studies identifying unequal participation as the most frequent drawback of online group work. Notably, not knowing teammates in advance was not a significant barrier in either group, suggesting that the real obstacle is not unfamiliarity but confidence that everyone will pull their weight.

The second decision tree, modeling whether team-working students would choose collaboration again, was even more accurate, classifying 91.4 percent of cases correctly. Its master variable was the value students placed on helping peers and benefiting from the resulting feedback. Students who rated mutual assistance above three points were highly likely to return to teams, and that likelihood rose further among those interested in building learning communities. For students with intermediate motivation to help and be helped, the prospect of improving grades tipped the balance, while those with low mutual-help motivation rarely persisted—unless they believed teamwork would lighten their workload. When the researchers compared students eager to repeat teamwork with those who preferred to retreat to individual work, the effect sizes on learning community perceptions were enormous, reaching d = 2.46 for the belief that teamwork enables mutual assistance among peers.

These results land at a particularly consequential moment for teacher education. The students in the study are future teachers, and their attitudes toward collaboration today will shape the classroom practices of tomorrow. Previous research has shown that many educators receive little formal training in teamwork pedagogy and are often unsure how to teach collaborative skills, which imposes additional transaction costs on already stretched instructors. The Spanish team argues that if teachers themselves are not convinced of the intrinsic value of teamwork, they will struggle to sell it to their students. Their data suggest that awareness and training efforts should be concentrated most intensely on future educators who gravitate toward individual work to avoid the difficulties of coordination and trust.

The theoretical grounding of the study connects these findings to a deeper tradition. Teamwork, the authors note, functions as a Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Development in which students learn from peers as well as instructors, and it aligns with Bandura’s social cognitive theory, in which learning emerges through dynamic, mutual interaction with others. In distance environments, collaboration also demands self-regulation, and the study taps into the emerging concept of socially shared regulation of learning, where teams collectively manage their own processes. The Community of Inquiry framework—teaching, cognitive, and social presence—provides the scaffolding for the instructor’s role: defining group sizes, assigning warm-up team-building activities in scarce face-to-face sessions, supplementing with online interactive games, and assessing individual contributions within team projects.

The practical prescriptions that follow are concrete. Instructors in hybrid settings should reserve precious in-person time for tasks best done face to face—team building, strategic discussion, defining objectives—while providing detailed written instructions for the online component, using synchronous meetings and interactive software deliberately, and evaluating both the process and the product through meeting minutes, peer and self-evaluations, and progress reports. Preparatory measures that build interpersonal familiarity before teams begin could directly address the trust deficit the data exposed. The authors also flag promising lines for future research: identifying which assignments suit blended environments best, using teamwork to reduce the isolation that remains a chronic weakness of distance education, and training future educators to champion collaboration with their own students. What the study makes clear is that teamwork in online universities is not a default that happens when students are placed in groups—it is a perception-driven choice, won or lost in the minds of learners long before the first meeting is scheduled.

Subject of Research: Perceptions of teamwork skill development among future teachers in hybrid and online university education

Article Title: Teamwork skills development in hybrid and online universities: the perspective of the future teachers

Article References: Teamwork skills development in hybrid and online universities: the perspective of the future teachers. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00032-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00032-1

Keywords: teamwork, blended learning, online education, collaborative learning, teacher training, employability skills, learning communities, CHAID decision tree, free rider problem, self-regulated learning, higher education, distance learning

The research, published in BMC Pediatrics by a team at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does CRM performance in pediatric healthcare providers change depending on how long ago they completed their ALS training? The question matters because certification cycles around the world, governed by bodies such as the American Heart Association and the European Resuscitation Council, typically run on two-year renewals, an interval chosen largely by convention rather than by hard evidence about how skills decay. If performance eroded steadily with time, shorter recertification cycles might be justified. If it did not, the problem would lie deeper than timing, in the very structure of how these courses teach.

To find out, the investigators recruited 99 ALS-certified participants at their quaternary care center, a cohort of 86 pediatric residents and 13 nurses. Participants were stratified into two groups: Group A, comprising 42 providers assessed less than six months after their ALS course, and Group B, comprising 57 providers assessed more than a year out. Each participant took the team leader’s seat in high-fidelity pediatric cardiac arrest scenarios built around three of the most demanding rhythm disturbances in pediatric medicine: ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and supraventricular tachycardia. High-fidelity manikins allowed the scenarios to respond dynamically to interventions, reproducing the cognitive load of a genuine in-hospital cardiac arrest without placing a child at risk.

The methodological rigor of the assessment is what gives the findings their weight. Every scenario was video recorded, and the recordings were scored independently using two validated instruments. Team leader performance was evaluated with the Anaesthetists’ Non-Technical Skills framework, a behavioral marker system originally developed for anesthesia that rates categories such as situation awareness, decision making, task management, and team working. Team member performance was scored with the Mayo High Performance Teamwork Scale, which captures behaviors like role clarity, information sharing, and closed-loop communication. Inter-rater reliability was strong, with intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.83 for the ANTS framework and 0.79 for the teamwork scale, indicating that different assessors watching the same videos reached substantially similar judgments.

The headline result is a null finding with significant implications. Team leader performance, measured by the ANTS framework, showed no statistically significant differences between providers fresh from training and those more than a year out. Team member performance on the Mayo scale was largely comparable as well. The one nuance emerged on univariate analysis, where the recently trained Group A actually performed slightly better on two specific dimensions: role clarity, demonstrated in 74.1 percent of assessments versus 46.1 percent in the later group, and clarity of communication, at 77.7 percent versus 48.7 percent, with p values of 0.04 and 0.02 respectively. Yet these differences were modest, confined to single domains, and the groups were not perfectly matched at baseline, since Group B participants were older and carried greater prior resuscitation experience, factors that could cut in either direction.

More striking than the between-group comparisons is what the study revealed about absolute performance. Across both groups, fundamental CRM behaviors appeared infrequently. Team members introduced themselves in only 35.7 percent of Group A scenarios and 15.7 percent of Group B scenarios, a difference that did not reach statistical significance. Role assignment by the leader occurred in just half of the recent-training group and 36.8 percent of the later group. Closed-loop communication and checklist use, two behaviors repeatedly linked to error reduction in high-stakes medicine, showed no meaningful differences and no encouraging rates in either arm. In other words, the problem was not that skills decayed after training; it was that many of these skills appeared never to have been robustly acquired in the first place.

This interpretation carries the study’s central message. The authors conclude that standard ALS training, whatever its strengths in teaching the technical algorithms of pediatric resuscitation, has inherent limitations in building non-technical competence. That conclusion aligns with a broader body of human-factors research showing that technical knowledge and team performance are separable constructs: a clinician can recite the pulseless ventricular tachycardia algorithm flawlessly and still fail to distribute workload, share situational awareness, or invite input from a nurse who has spotted a dislodged lead. Simulation science has argued for decades that these behaviors must be deliberately practiced, observed, and debriefed, not merely mentioned in a lecture hall between rhythm recognition drills.

The setting of the study adds a crucial dimension. Conducted at a quaternary care pediatric center in India, the work addresses a conspicuous evidence gap, since most CRM research originates in high-income countries with mature simulation infrastructures and different staffing realities. In low- and middle-income settings, where pediatric intensive care units may face higher patient volumes, fewer trained staff per bed, and limited access to recurring simulation programs, the stakes of suboptimal teamwork are correspondingly higher. The authors explicitly frame their findings around this context, suggesting that structured, simulation-based reinforcement strategies may be needed to sustain CRM development where formal recertification alone cannot do the job.

For hospital educators and resuscitation committees, the practical takeaways are concrete. First, the timing of recertification is probably the wrong lever to pull if the goal is better teamwork; a provider at month five and a provider at month eighteen performed similarly. Second, in-situ simulation programs, brief scenario rehearsals conducted in the actual clinical environment, offer a plausible mechanism for embedding role assignment, introductions, and closed-loop communication as habits rather than test-day performances. Third, the validated scoring tools used here, ANTS and the Mayo scale, give institutions a ready-made language for measuring progress, and the high inter-rater reliability reported in this study suggests such measurement can be dependable even outside specialist simulation centers.

The study is not without limits, and the authors are careful about what their data can support. The cross-sectional design captures a snapshot rather than tracking individuals over time, and the baseline differences in age and resuscitation experience between groups complicate any causal reading of the small advantages seen in the recently trained cohort. The sample, drawn from a single quaternary center, may not generalize to smaller hospitals. Yet the consistency of the null result across two validated instruments, and the low absolute rates of critical behaviors, make the core conclusion difficult to dismiss. As pediatric resuscitation science matures, the question is shifting from whether clinicians hold a certificate to whether they can actually lead, communicate, and coordinate when a child’s life hangs in the balance. This study suggests that answering that question will require more than a renewal date on a card; it will require deliberate, repeated, simulation-based practice that treats teamwork as a clinical skill in its own right.

Subject of Research: Crisis resource management performance and time since Advanced Life Support training in pediatric healthcare providers

Article Title: Association between time since advanced life support training and crisis resource management performance in pediatric healthcare providers: a simulation-based study

Article References: Association between time since advanced life support training and crisis resource management performance in pediatric healthcare providers: a simulation-based study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07758-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07758-7

Keywords: pediatrics, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, crisis resource management, advanced life support, simulation training, teamwork, clinical competence, non-technical skills, medical education, cardiac arrest, LMIC healthcare, BMC Pediatrics

The research, led by Teresa M. Cochran of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Allied Health Professions, together with colleagues at Creighton University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney, tested what the team calls a longitudinal tele-team model. Thirty-two health professions students from four disciplines—physical therapy, occupational therapy, medical nutrition, and speech-language pathology—were organized into small interprofessional teams. Each team met six times over a sustained period with community-dwelling stroke survivors, conducting sessions remotely via telehealth. The design deliberately paired the authenticity of real patient relationships with the accessibility of virtual delivery, allowing students in different programs and locations to collaborate without the logistical barriers that often doom interprofessional education initiatives.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is that it did not rely on a single measure of success. The researchers used a convergent mixed methods design, combining quantitative surveys with qualitative focus groups to capture both the magnitude and the texture of change. Students completed the Interprofessional Collaborative Competency Attainment Survey, or ICCAS, as a retrospective pre-post instrument, meaning they rated their own competencies before and after the experience in a single sitting—a technique that reduces the response bias that can arise when learners’ understanding of a concept shifts during training. Team-level functioning was tracked with the Relational Coordination Survey, administered after each of the six sessions, providing a session-by-session trajectory rather than a single endpoint snapshot.

Relational coordination is a concept borrowed from organizational sociology that describes how work groups coordinate through shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect, communicated through frequent, timely, accurate, and problem-solving exchanges. In health care, high relational coordination has been linked to better patient outcomes and lower staff burnout, but it is rarely measured in educational settings. By collecting RCS data after every session, the Nebraska team could model how coordination developed over time rather than assuming it appeared fully formed. Stroke survivors added a third perspective, completing the Patient Insights and Views Observing Team survey, known as PIVOT, at the midpoint and end of the program—an unusually direct way of asking patients whether the students were actually functioning as a team.

The quantitative findings were consistent across all three instruments. On the ICCAS, students reported statistically significant improvements in every measured domain of interprofessional competency, with p-values below 0.05, spanning areas such as communication, role clarification, patient-centered care, and conflict management. The Relational Coordination Survey told a longitudinal story: linear mixed-effects modeling revealed a significant positive trajectory over the six sessions, with a beta coefficient of 0.06 per session (standard error 0.016, p < 0.001). That may sound like a small number, but in a model of repeated measures it indicates a steady, statistically robust climb in how well team members communicated and trusted one another as the weeks accumulated.

Perhaps the most revealing analysis came when the researchers correlated the two student-facing instruments. Higher relational coordination scores were moderately to strongly associated with higher self-assessed competencies, with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.62 for the domains of communication, patient-centered care, and conflict management. In plain terms, the students whose teams were knitting together socially and communicatively were the same students who felt they were mastering the collaborative skills that educators care about. This convergence suggests that individual competency and team-level coordination are not separate educational outcomes but intertwined processes, each reinforcing the other as a team matures.

Crucially, the patients agreed. Stroke survivors reported significant improvements in team functioning on the PIVOT survey, with a p-value of 0.031, indicating that the gains students and their teams perceived were visible to the people on the receiving end of care. That external validation matters, because self-report measures in education research are often criticized for capturing enthusiasm rather than ability. Here, three independent vantage points—student competency ratings, team communication scores, and patient observations—moved in the same direction.

The qualitative arm of the study filled in the why. Analysis of student focus groups yielded five themes: the value of learning from patient experience, role clarification, relationship-building, the importance of longitudinal engagement, and the feasibility of the tele-team model. Students described how hearing directly from stroke survivors about their daily challenges taught them things no textbook could, and how repeated sessions allowed them to move past the awkwardness of unfamiliar professional roles. The longitudinal structure appears to be doing heavy lifting here—six sessions gave teams time to develop the shared knowledge and mutual respect that relational coordination theory identifies as the foundation of effective collaboration, something a single simulation afternoon cannot supply.

The telehealth delivery model carries implications well beyond stroke rehabilitation education. Rural communities, which the study’s funding from the American Heart Association’s Mission Lifeline Rural Stroke Innovators Grant implicitly acknowledges, often lack access to interprofessional rehabilitation services and to the training pipelines that produce them. A tele-team format lets students from different universities and disciplines participate without travel, and lets patients contribute from their own homes, where the realities of living with stroke are most visible. The authors describe the approach as scalable, and the study’s structure—small teams, scheduled sessions, standardized surveys—lends itself to replication in other regions and other patient populations.

There are, of course, limits to what one study can establish. The sample of thirty-two students is modest, the ICCAS relies on self-assessment even in its retrospective format, and the educational program was evaluated as a quality improvement activity rather than registered as human subjects research, as the University of Nebraska Medical Center Institutional Review Board determined. The authors also note that the version of the article shared ahead of final publication remains subject to editorial completion. Still, the convergent evidence—quantitative trajectories, cross-measure correlations, patient confirmation, and rich qualitative themes—makes a compelling case that the field’s evaluation toolkit should expand. Combining an individual competency measure like the ICCAS with a team-level measure like the RCS, the researchers argue, gives educators a far more complete picture of how collaborative capacity actually develops. If the findings hold up across larger and more diverse cohorts, the humble video call, repeated week after week with a real patient at the center, may prove to be one of the most effective classrooms interprofessional education has ever had.

Subject of Research: Interprofessional education through longitudinal telehealth student teams caring for stroke survivors

Article Title: Improving interprofessional competencies and relational coordination through longitudinal tele-teams: a mixed methods study

Article References: Cochran, T. M., Kennel, V., Beam, E. L., Jensen, L. E., Volkman, K. G., McKelvey, M., & Jensen, G. M. (2026). Improving interprofessional competencies and relational coordination through longitudinal tele-teams: a mixed methods study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10472-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10472-8

Keywords: interprofessional education, telehealth, relational coordination, stroke rehabilitation, health professions education, teamwork, mixed methods, ICCAS, patient-centered care, longitudinal learning, medical education, collaborative practice

Interprofessional education, commonly abbreviated as IPE, has become a global priority in health professions training. The logic is straightforward: most avoidable harm in healthcare systems traces back to failures of communication and coordination among professionals who were trained in silos and never learned to work as a team. When doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, and nutritionists learn together during their formative years, the argument goes, they carry collaborative habits into clinical practice. Yet implementing IPE is notoriously difficult. Timetables across professional schools rarely align, faculty may lack training in facilitating interprofessional groups, and professional cultures steeped in hierarchy can undermine even well-designed shared learning activities. In many low- and middle-income countries, these structural obstacles are compounded by resource constraints, making creative use of existing educational infrastructure especially attractive.

The UDS study focused on two distinctive programmes. The Third Trimester Field Practical Programme (TTFPP) is an unusual curricular feature in which students across the university spend a trimester living in and studying assigned communities, conducting longitudinal fieldwork on social, economic, and health conditions. The Community-Based Education and Service (COBES) programme similarly immerses health professions students in community settings for structured learning and service. Both programmes have operated for years and are deeply embedded in the university’s identity. What the researchers wanted to know was whether these established structures, already bringing students into authentic community contexts, could be harnessed deliberately for interprofessional education, or whether the interprofessional contact they generate is too incidental to build on.

To answer that question, the team conducted a qualitative descriptive study grounded in an interpretivist paradigm, an approach that treats participants’ accounts not as objective measurements but as meaningful constructions of their lived experience. They recruited a purposive quota sample of 30 participants: 20 final-year health professions students and 10 faculty members, drawn from five professions, namely medicine, nursing, midwifery, nutrition, and pharmacy, all of whom had direct experience of either TTFPP or COBES. Data collection relied on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted by the first author, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The researchers then applied team-based codebook thematic analysis, a rigorous method in which multiple analysts independently code the data against a shared framework, reconciling differences to strengthen reliability, with the support of NVivo qualitative analysis software. Reporting followed the COREQ guideline, an international standard for transparency in qualitative research, and the study received ethical clearance from the university’s Institutional Review Board.

The findings paint a picture of genuine promise undermined by a lack of intentionality. Participants across all five professions described interprofessional education in broadly consistent terms, associating it with teamwork, collaboration, and improved communication in healthcare delivery. They also regarded community-based education as a valuable forum in which such learning could plausibly occur, precisely because it places students from different professions in shared, authentic situations where a community’s problems do not respect professional boundaries. A village health challenge, in other words, naturally demands the complementary perspectives of a nurse, a nutritionist, and a physician in training. Participants believed that the community setting strips away some of the artificiality of classroom-based interprofessional exercises and replaces it with experiential learning that feels consequential.

Yet the study’s central and most striking finding is that the interprofessional contact occurring within these programmes is largely unplanned and informal rather than deliberately structured. Students from different professions may find themselves in the same community, sharing transport, accommodation, or informal conversations, and they may learn something about one another’s roles along the way. But no formal mechanism requires them to work together on shared tasks, reflect jointly on community findings, or negotiate professional roles in collaborative service delivery. The interprofessional learning that happens is, in effect, a by-product, serendipitous and uneven, dependent on chance rather than curriculum design. This distinction matters enormously for educational outcomes, because decades of IPE research indicate that informal exposure alone rarely dismantles stereotypes or builds the role-clarity that effective collaboration requires.

The thematic analysis surfaced five overarching themes from the interviews: participants’ understanding and valuation of IPE; their understanding and valuation of CBE; their belief that CBE could serve as a platform for IPE; the barriers that currently impede such use; and the strategies and opportunities for improvement. The barrier theme was particularly rich, encompassing communication difficulties among students and staff, organisational and resource constraints, inadequate supervision, professional hierarchy, and a fundamental lack of planning and scheduling for interprofessional activities. Each of these barriers is well recognised in the international IPE literature, but their convergence in the Ghanaian community setting illustrates how a promising platform can remain dormant when the surrounding institutional machinery is not aligned behind it.

Professional hierarchy deserves particular attention, because it is the barrier most resistant to logistical fixes. In many health systems, including Ghana’s, status differences between medicine and other professions are deeply culturally embedded, and students absorb these attitudes long before they qualify. When interprofessional activities lack explicit facilitation, hierarchical norms tend to reassert themselves, with medical students assuming leadership and other professions deferring regardless of the task at hand. The participants’ accounts suggest that without deliberate structuring, community placements may inadvertently reproduce the very siloed and stratified behaviours that interprofessional education is meant to dissolve. Conversely, a well-facilitated community task in which each profession’s contribution is indispensable could be a uniquely effective equaliser, since in a village setting no single professional toolkit is sufficient.

The improvement strategies identified by participants map closely onto what implementation science would predict. Realising the interprofessional potential of CBE, the study concludes, is likely to require intentional curricular integration, institutional support, structured supervision, and formalised interprofessional activities. In practical terms, that means designing shared community assignments that require genuine collaboration, training and deploying supervisors who can facilitate interprofessional groups, aligning the schedules and logistics of the five professional programmes, and securing institutional commitment so that interprofessional outcomes are assessed rather than left to chance. None of these requirements demands new physical infrastructure; they demand coordination, planning, and a willingness to treat the existing community programmes as educational platforms rather than standalone traditions.

The significance of the study extends well beyond one university in Tamale. Health professions schools across sub-Saharan Africa and other resource-constrained settings operate community-based programmes of various kinds, and many face the same dilemma: they cannot easily afford dedicated interprofessional education infrastructure, yet they already possess community placements that generate informal interprofessional contact. The UDS findings offer a template for interrogating those placements systematically, asking students and faculty what actually happens in the field and what would need to change for collaboration to become the rule rather than the accident. As health systems worldwide confront workforce shortages and the rising burden of chronic disease, the case for training collaborative practitioners has never been stronger, and this Ghanaian study suggests that the raw material for such training may already exist in the villages where students go to learn, waiting only to be organised with intention.

Subject of Research: Student and faculty perceptions of community-based education as a platform for interprofessional education in Ghana

Article Title: Student and faculty perspectives on community-based education as a potential platform for interprofessional education in Ghana

Article References: Assibi, M. A., Abugri, B. A., Gaa, P. K., Ziblim, S.-D., Amalba, A., & Mogre, V. (2026). Student and faculty perspectives on community-based education as a potential platform for interprofessional education in Ghana. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10495-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10495-1

Keywords: interprofessional education, community-based education, health professions education, Ghana, qualitative research, collaborative learning, experiential learning, University for Development Studies, medical education, teamwork, professional hierarchy, curriculum design

The model, called the Teamwork Response Tree, or TRTree, was developed by Peida Zhan and Gaohong Chu of the School of Psychology at Zhejiang Normal University in China. It belongs to a family of techniques known as item response tree models, which have proven powerful in individual assessment for disentangling the psychological processes that lie behind a single observable answer. What Zhan and Chu have done is extend this machinery to pairs of people working together, modeling the dyad rather than the lone test-taker as the unit of collaboration.

The core idea is elegant. When two team members respond to a collaborative item, their joint outcome can be represented as a branching tree of latent decisions. At the first branch sits the agreement process: did the partners, whatever their individual views, manage to settle on a common answer? At the second branch sits the accuracy process: given that agreement was reached, was the agreed-upon answer correct? Each branch is governed by its own latent variables. Individual ability captures how skilled each member is, team-level ability reflects the joint competence of the pair, agreement propensity describes a team’s tendency to converge rather than disagree, and item-level agreement difficulty captures how hard it is for any team to reach consensus on a particular task.

This decomposition matters because conventional scoring methods typically conflate the two dimensions. A team that agrees quickly but is wrong receives the same low score, roughly speaking, as a team that disagrees endlessly on what was actually a solvable problem. Conversely, a team lucky enough to guess identically and correctly looks indistinguishable from one that reasoned its way to the truth together. By formally separating convergence from correctness, the TRTree model allows researchers to ask subtler questions: Is this team good at problem-solving but poor at communication? Does agreement on easy items come more readily than agreement on hard ones? Does one member’s ability dominate the joint outcome?

The authors formulated the model within the item response tree framework and estimated its parameters using Bayesian methods, an approach that has become standard for complex psychometric models because it handles the intricate dependency structures that arise in dyadic data. Bayesian estimation also provides full uncertainty quantification for every parameter, which is essential when the quantities of interest, such as a team’s latent agreement propensity, are never directly observed.

To demonstrate the model in action, Zhan and Chu applied it to empirical data from dyadic collaborative matrix reasoning tasks, the kind of visual puzzles familiar from intelligence assessments but adapted for two people to solve jointly. Their earlier work in this area drew on a dataset of 67 teams, and the data used in the present study expanded the total to 160 teams. The empirical illustration showed that the model yields interpretable estimates across all four key dimensions: individual ability, team-level ability, team-level agreement propensity, and item-level agreement difficulty. In other words, the outputs are not just statistically well-behaved but substantively meaningful for anyone trying to understand how a particular pair works together.

Interpretability alone is not enough for a measurement model, however; it must also recover the truth from limited data. To test that, the researchers conducted a Monte Carlo simulation study, generating synthetic datasets under a range of conditions and checking whether the estimation procedure could recover the known parameter values. The results indicated satisfactory parameter recovery, with estimation accuracy improving in predictable ways as the data became more informative. That predictability is valuable for practitioners: it means researchers designing collaborative assessments can anticipate how much data they need, and how informative their items must be, to obtain trustworthy measurements of agreement and accuracy separately.

The broader context makes clear why this contribution arrives at a pressing moment. Collaborative problem-solving has been elevated to the status of a core twenty-first-century competency, appearing in international assessments such as PISA 2015 and shaping hiring and training in sectors from healthcare to aviation. Yet measurement has lagged behind ambition. Assessments of teamwork have often relied on self-report questionnaires, observer ratings, or final-outcome scores, none of which fully capture the dynamic interplay between team members. Prior psychometric work has begun to model interaction patterns and process-stream data, and Zhan and Chu’s own earlier teamwork cognitive diagnostic model contributed to that movement, but the TRTree adds a distinct process-level lens by treating agreement itself as a measurable latent tendency rather than a byproduct of correctness.

The implications run in several directions. For assessment designers, the model offers a principled scoring approach that preserves information about the interaction process, potentially enabling feedback that tells a team not just that they underperformed but why, whether through weak individual skills or through a failure to converge. For researchers studying team effectiveness, separating agreement from accuracy opens new questions: teams with high agreement propensity but modest ability may be fast but fragile, while teams with high ability but low agreement propensity may contain the right raw material undone by coordination failure. Items themselves can now be characterized by agreement difficulty, allowing test developers to build assessments that deliberately probe consensus-building alongside problem-solving.

The model code and data for estimating the TRTree have been made openly available on the Open Science Framework, lowering the barrier for other laboratories to adopt and extend the approach. Like any new measurement framework, it will face the test of application across different task types, team sizes beyond dyads, and real-world settings where collaboration is messier than a matrix reasoning puzzle. But by giving researchers a way to formally distinguish the science of agreeing from the science of being right, the Teamwork Response Tree model marks a genuine step toward assessments that measure how teams work, not merely what they produce.

Subject of Research: A psychometric model separating agreement and accuracy processes in dyadic collaborative problem-solving assessment

Article Title: A teamwork response tree model for dyadic agreement-accuracy responses

Article References: Zhan, P., & Chu, G. (2026). A teamwork response tree model for dyadic agreement-accuracy responses. Behavior Research Methods, 58(11), Article 303. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03178-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-026-03178-8

Keywords: teamwork measurement, collaborative problem solving, item response tree model, item response theory, agreement-accuracy responses, dyadic data, Bayesian estimation, psychometrics, matrix reasoning, team ability, behavior research methods, teamwork