Background: Today, flipped classroom (FC) has been widely used in medical education. However, the effectiveness of FC remains controversial. The variation may cause by different subjects or different course design. Moreover, those studies did not explain how the association among different domains of learning objective was in FCs. The purpose of this study was to explore the help of learning domains from a FC of suturing skill in year-5 medical students.
Design: This study determined sample size according to statistical power. A minimum number of 77 participants for regression analysis are needed. Therefore, this study enrolled 78 medical students in a 2-hour suturing course, which consisted of pre-class video and in-class instruction. Both simple and mattress suturing were taught. The students received an anonymous survey with questionnaire of Help from Instruction Questionnaire for Clinical Skills (HIQ-CS) after the course. The HIQ-CS was developed by medical education team according to Bloom's taxonomy, and its reliability was favorable (Cronbach's ^l = 0.839). Factor loadings among all items in the HIQ-CS was also favorable (0.790 to 0.849). This study determined consensus of students' perspective by median (Me) and interquartile range (IQR), and tested mediation among different learning domains by regression.
Results: The results showed medical students agreed FC can help them in learning suturing (Me = 4, IQR = 1). The cognitive help (β = .526, p < .001) was completely mediated by psychomotor help (β = .399, p < .001) and affective help (β = .413, p < .001) to overall helps in FC. The affective help (β = .617, p < .001) was partially mediated by psychomotor help to overall helps in FC.
Conclusions: FC may help students in learning suturing skill in different domains. Our model explains the cognitive help from FC provides an important foundation for the helps of other domains. Although the model should be examined by different curricula and measurements in future, the model of help from instruction in our study provided an innovated concept and framework in medical education.