Introduction: The purpose of this study was to examine students' ability to use effective clinical collaboration online in a designed scaffolded environment. Three groups were formed to achieve this goal: two control groups (one using no collaboration and one using live, face-to-face collaboration) and one treatment group using virtual collaboration.
Method: A quasi-experimental design was conducted at two U.S. universities to examine whether there is a significant difference in clinical reasoning skills between three treatment groups using IUP Audiosim software. Two computer-based audiology case simulations were developed, and participants were randomly placed into the three groups. The clinical reasoning data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance and Tukey's post hoc analyses.
Results: The results indicated that there was a significant difference in clinical reasoning skills between the three treatment groups. The score obtained by the no-collaboration group was significantly less than the scores obtained by the virtual and live collaboration groups.
Conclusions: The results imply that lower scores were associated with students receiving more instructor-designed content and higher scores with students receiving less instructor-designed content. Students who received more scaffolds with the collaborations may have demonstrated better decision-making outside the training exercise than those who did not receive scaffolds. However, lower scores on the exercise did not necessarily imply lower skill. Lower scores simply implied a different path toward mastery.