Limitations and future directions
There are a few more limitations in addition to the one just mentioned above. First, the implementation of the hypothesis-testing procedure was not optimal in the current study. Many of the hypotheses were unfortunately not analytical. Second, given that hypothesis-testing is a cognitively demanding task, it could take the trainees more than two practice rounds to obtain an adequate level of skill. Therefore, the training of hypothesis-testing itself may require further investment to be effective.The current study lacked sensitivity to elements other than question type when measuring interview quality. The exact questions the interviewers asked were not recorded, so we did not know whether there was a difference in the quality of questions of those in the combined interventions group compared to those who received a single intervention alone. Thus, we recommend that future studies look specifically into the question being asked as well as the self-reported strategy in managing two tasks to gain a better understanding of the execution of hypothesis-testing via interviewer performance, that is, whether the question itself allows testing of hypothesis, as well as of how interviewers, even though with improved questioning skills and good quality information elicited from Avatars, landed on so few completely correct conclusions.