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Archived Comments for: Medical student attitudes toward video games and related new media technologies in medical education

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  1. Correction to Table 3

    Michael Fetters, University of Michigan

    11 January 2011

    Michael, I found your recently published article in BMC Medical Education (2010, 10:50) very interesting. I have started using Second Life, an online virtual world, for crime scene simulations in my forensic science class.

    I am writing because I am having a little difficulty interpreting table 3 in your article. I printed your article from biomedcentral.com. Even though it is not clear, it looks like the first three columns are those
    students who agreed, and the next three columns are for those who disagreed. I think some data for the fourth survey question, "I feel that video games can have educational value" are transposed. The totals
    for males and females do not add up to 100%, e.g., 89% (for males that agree) + 27% (for males that disagree).

    In the text you state that females are only about 39% as likely as males to believe in the potential educational value of video games, and females are about 31% as likely as males to want to be part of a team to design an educational video game. Can you explain how you determined these percentages?

    thanks,
    --

    Don Lehman, Ed.D., MT(ASCP), SM(NRM)
    Dept. Medical Technology
    University of Delaware
    Newark, DE

    Dr. Lehman is correct. With reference to Table 3: thank you for pointing it out. There is indeed a typo in Table 3: Q4 (I feel that video games can have educational value) two percentages (11 and 27) under Disagree M and F are interchanged by mistake.

    As for your question how we determined the percentages towards the statement that females are only about 39% as likely as maless ... etc, please consider the following: Binary logistic regression has been used to model the dichotomous outcomes with gender, institutional affiliation, familiarity level (basic/intermediate or advanced), age as independent variables.

    Thanks to Dr. Lehman on behalf of all the authors.

    Michael D. Fetters, MD, MPH, MA

    Competing interests

    There are no relevant conflicting interests regarding this point.

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