Game-Based Teaching: Enhancing Medical Students’ Gender Competency and Promoting LGBT Friendly Healthcare

Game-Based Teaching: Enhancing Medical Students’ Gender Competency and Promoting LGBT Friendly Healthcare

How can medical educators make good use of teaching methods to cultivate medical students’ gender competency while teaching students psychiatry and healthcare education? Yang Hsing-Chen, a professor at Kaohsiung Medical University(KMU), who is devoted to the study of gender and medical education, responded to this question in her paper “Education First: Promoting LGBT Friendly Health Care with a Competency-Based Course and Game-Based Teaching.” Using the competency-based medical education (CBME) perspective and gender courses in psychiatric clinical education, this research paper explored whether the application of game-based teaching activities can promote gender learning and improve the gender competency of students.

Design games to teach gender and psychiatry

Game-based teaching and learning is a participatory educational approach in which students brainstorm together to solve problems. The research course, LGBT Health and Medical Care (LGBT HMC) was added to KMU psychiatric clinical education training for one academic year. According to the competency-based course and teaching design ideas, a 3 × 3-grid game was designed as the warm-up game for LGBT HMC. Apart from stimulating learning motivation, this game served as an evaluative tool, functioning as a pretest and formative evaluation. The aim of this game was to prompt learning motivation. It was designed to assess students’ prior LGBT knowledge–, which provided feedback informing the adjustment of the course and the improvement of learning conditions. Those questions of the 3 × 3 grid game were designed to elicit responses regarding students’ understanding of LGBT health care and mental health issues and could be answered from the perspectives of knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

“It’s a game, even if you don’t know the answer, it’s a pleasant frustration”

Using the 3 × 3 grid game as the teaching activity aimed to achieve two objectives: to trigger the learning motivation of students and encourage them to proceed to concept learning and to prevent lecturing on LGBT concepts from becoming an instance of the “banking education.” Because competency can only be formed through learning processes rather than through direct inculcation. Student responses revealed that game-based teaching can help teachers to convey and integrate gender and medical knowledge or concepts into a game; students can connect with the course content and experience knowledge transformation to achieve positive learning outcomes. With respect to LGBT medical and health care issues, within the context of a game, students were able to express and discuss their correct, incorrect, or even biased understanding regarding LGBT communities without being overly concerned with providing politically correct answers. These interactions and dialogues led to meaningful learning.

When Professor Yang and her researcher team and the teachers were designing the questions for the 3 × 3 grid game, the answers to some of the questions were considered basic knowledge that students must know and be capable of understanding. Surprisingly, none of these students, who had already commenced their internships in a hospital, could state the year in which homosexuality was removed from the classification of mental diseases. Numerous students did not know what “transgender” meant, and a few students were unfamiliar with the meaning of LGBT. As previously stated, successful game-based learning is adequately challenging and pleasantly frustrating. Experiencing challenges can also be positively stimulating in a game and provoke learning motivation among students; for example, one student stated that “You become curious about what the other questions are, and that draws my attention.” The students were more focused and invested in the following section of the course, which explained the concepts of LGBT health issues and psychiatry. The game achieved the exploratory function of game-based learning and provoked active thinking in students.

This study revealed that the 3 × 3 grid game, which served as the teaching activity and assessment tool, also supported learning and teaching. The game helps with learning by identifying difficulties and misconceptions experienced by students, and this enables the timely provision of instructional scaffolding to enhance efficacy. For example, the course was designed to conduct concept teaching after the game, and the concepts included the history of the removal of homosexuality from the classification of mental diseases and an introduction to LGBT communities. The teachers also invited LGBT individuals to the class to share their own medical experiences. These real-life experiences gave the answers to the questions in the game and helped the students with the integration of knowledge, attitudes, and skills. In addition, the game helps teaching because the design of the game facilitates the integration of assessment into teaching, which makes the assessment part of the teaching method and teaching activity rather than a supplementary evaluative tool. In fact, both aspects of the game can enhance assessment for teaching and exhibit the value of the instant feedback obtained in CBME and game-based learning.

Use teaching methods strategically to improve learning effectiveness

The findings of this study were as follows: (1) Games encouraged student participation and benefited gender knowledge transmission and transformation through competency learning. (2) Games embodied the idea of assessment as learning. The enjoyable feeling of pressure from playing games motivated students to learn. Using games as both a teaching activity and an assessment tool provides the assessment and instant feedback required in the CBME learning process. In short, game-based teaching successfully guides medical students to learn about gender and psychiatry and   achieve the learning goal of integrating knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

Main researcher: Professor Hsing-Chen Yang，Graduate Institute of Gender Studies, Kaohsiung Medical University

Author Email: yhc@kmu.edu.tw

Paper cited from:

Yang, H. C. (2019). Education first: Promoting LGBT+ friendly healthcare with a competency-based course and game-based teaching. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(1), 107; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17010107

Research Paper available online on website: https://reurl.cc/Y6dxEO