Facilitating Reveals of Hidden Meanings in Communication through Game-based Learning in a Hybrid Course

Background: Effective patients-doctor communication in patient-centered medicine requires the skills of revealing the hidden meaning in the communication and then understanding abstract concepts of patients' psychosocial concerns. Qualitative data analysis in qualitative research helps students develop interpretive techniques to reveal hidden meanings, but students often report difficulties when teach by lectures. Game-based learning has been used to teach complicated skills but was few applied in medical education. Purpose: was to develop a hybrid ＂Qualitative Research＂ course embedded with game-based learning and to explore how such a design helped students learn interpretive techniques in qualitative data analysis. Methods: A total of 19 graduate students took the course in a medical school. The open-ended parts of survey were used for both textual and contextual analyses. Results: Thematic analysis indicated positive outcomes: (1) enhancing motivations, (2) concreting procedures, (3) understanding influencing factors (4) realizing data validation as a must, (5) reducing fear in applying the skills. Conclusions: Revealing the meaning of the information is the first step to better understand patients' concerns and unspoken messages. GBL provides good learning atmosphere and facilitates knowledge transfer. The positive responses suggest GBL as a feasible model of teaching in medical education.