Practice and reflection on educational reform for cultivating the clinical thinking ability of medical students in internal medicine / 中华医学教育探索杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To evaluate the effects of comprehensive reform of clinical education on cultivating the clinical thinking ability of medical students in internal medicine.Methods:A total of 44 clinical interns on medicine rotation were included in this study and divided into experimental group and control group, and a series of measures for clinical teaching reform, which included undergraduate tutorial system, team-based learning (TBL) mode, combination of electronic medical record and handwritten medical record, as well as formative assessment, were applied to fully promote clinical thinking ability of medical students. SPSS 17.0 software was used to compare the scores of final academic tests of rotation and competition of medical record writing between the control and the experiment groups. Self-designed questionnaires on undergraduate tutors and clinical interns were applied to comprehensively evaluate the effects of this education reform.Results:Independent-sample t tests showed there were statistically significant difference ( P<0.01) in the scores of final academic tests of rotation and competition of medical record writing between the two groups, and the mean score of the experiment group was higher than that of the control group. Questionnaire survey showed that tutors and clinical interns both fully affirmed the positive effects of the education reform on cultivating clinical thinking ability of medical students in internal medicine. Conclusion:Application of comprehensive education reform in clinical teaching of internal medicine, which based on introduction of undergraduate tutorial system and TBL mode, could effectively promote the clinical thinking ability of medical students and the teaching quality.