In 2021 James Kryklywy’s study out of the Motivated Cognition Lab @ UBC, Assessing the efficacy of tablet-based simulations for learning pseudo-surgical instrumentation James H. Kryklywy , Victoria A. Roach, Rebecca M. Todd was published.

James and his team created simulated instrument sets and surgical procedures with nomenclature encountered by novice perioperative nurses. “Learning was assessed following training in three distinct conditions: tablet-based simulations, text-based study, and real-world practice. Immediately following a 30-minute training period, instrument identification was performed with comparable accuracy and response times following tablet-based versus text-based training, with both being inferior to real-world practice. ”

Interestingly, results noted with 46 participants were:

“Following a week without practice, response times were equivalent between real-world and tablet-based practice. While tablet-based training does not achieve equivalent results in instrument identification accuracy as real-world practice, more practice repetitions in simulated environments may help reduce performance decline. “

“During tablet-based training, peak performance was obtained at 19.2 minutes (Accuracy = 97.2%; CI 95% = 15.03–23.63 minutes; Fig 3C). In contrast, a later performance plateau was observed during real-world practice, with a performance plateau observed after 26.03 minutes (Accuracy = 87.4%; CI 95% = 23.73–28.62 minutes; Fig 3D).”

One of the key items for discussion was:

“Immediate retention tests demonstrated a response time advantage for real-world training compared to simulation training, suggesting a more efficient nurse-surgeon interaction could result. Interestingly, however, this effect disappeared at test points one-week later, suggesting that tablet-based training may be less susceptible to performance decline than real-world training. To investigate the process of learning in each environment, additional analyses identified the level and latency of peak performance for each interactive training method. While the number of repetitions to reach peak performance was equivalent for tablet-based simulation and real-world training, net time spent training before reaching peak performance indicated that learners reached peak performance faster when practicing with tablet-based simulations. This finding suggests that with tablet-based training compared to real-world practice, less time is required to obtain knowledge for the procedures, thus more of the training period is spent practicing learned procedures.”

In conclusion:

“The current results suggest notable benefits from tablet-based simulations, including enhanced object-oriented responding compared to text-based study, and increased practice repetitions compared to real-world practice over equivalent training time. Furthermore, this work demonstrated that knowledge acquired from tablet-simulations can be transferred to real-world tasks both immediately and at a delay, but that it may not replicate the full interactive benefits of practicing with real-world items immediately prior to the tested procedure.”