Framework and Schema are False Synonyms: Defining Terms to Improve Learning.

Clinical reasoning is an essential expertise of health care professionals that includes the complex cognitive processes that lead to diagnosis and management decisions. In order to optimally teach, learn, and assess clinical reasoning, it is imperative for teachers and learners to have a shared understanding of the language. Currently, educators use the terms schema and framework interchangeably but they are distinct concepts. In this paper, we offer definitions for schema and framework and use the high-stakes field of aviation to demonstrate the interplay of these concepts. We offer examples of framework and schema in the medical education field and discuss how a clear understanding of these concepts allows for greater intentionality when teaching and assessing clinical reasoning.

Self-regulated learning and the future of diagnostic reasoning education.

Diagnostic reasoning is a foundational ability of health professionals. The goal of enhancing clinical reasoning education is improved diagnostic accuracy and reduced diagnostic error. In order to do so, health professions educators need not only help learners improve their clinical reasoning, but teach them how to develop expert performance. An evidence-based learning strategy that is strongly associated with expert performance is self-regulated learning (SRL). SRL is the modulation of "self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals". At this time, there is little data on the use of SRL to improve diagnostic reasoning. However, there appear to be numerous opportunities to utilize SRL in novel ways to improve diagnostic reasoning given what is already known about this competency. Examples that are discussed include the role SRL can play in simulation, clinical experiences, assessment, and novel technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. SRL is central to the philosophy that health professionals are life-long learners, as it teaches learners "how to learn". SRL has the potential to help achieve the goal of improved diagnostic accuracy and reduced diagnostic error.

Learning Theories Versus Practice: How Do Internal Medicine Residents Study for Licensing Examinations?

OBJECTIVE:  The ability to recall relevant medical knowledge within clinical contexts is a critical aspect of effective and efficient patient diagnosis and management. The ever-growing and changing body of medical literature requires learners to develop effective life-long learning techniques. Learners can more successfully build their fund of knowledge and ability to retrieve it by using evidence-based learning strategies. Our objective was to evaluate the study habits of internal medicine (IM) residents at an academic institution to understand if they apply key learning strategies for the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) exam preparation. We also briefly review various learning strategies that can be applied to IM residency curricula. METHODS: A web-based survey consisting of 16 multiple-response questions on study habits was filled out by the IM residents in 2019 at Tufts Medical Center. RESULTS: Of the 75 residents invited to participate in the study, 69 responded (response rate = 92%). Of the responders, n=25 (36.2%) were post-graduate year (PGY)-1, n=20 (29.0%) were PGY-2, and n=24 (34.8%) were PGY-3 residents. More than half the residents (n=40, 58%) had Step 2 Clinical Knowledge (CK) scores > 250. Residents self-reported applying spaced learning (67%), interleaving (64%), retrieval (64%), and elaboration practices (46%) for exam preparation. There was a significant association between the Step 2 CK score and elaboration (p=0.017) technique but not with spaced learning, interleaving, or retrieval. The majority of residents felt not at all prepared (n=42, 60.9%) for the ABIM exam. CONCLUSIONS: Despite two years of clinical training, 33% of the third-year residents felt inadequately prepared for the board certification exam. Incorporating evidence-based learning strategies into their daily curriculum may help them better prepare for the ABIM exam.

The Diagnostic Medical Interview.

The diagnostic medical interview spans from the chief concern to the formation of a differential diagnosis. The patient's unique expression of their symptoms is the central component of this conversation. The interview should begin by eliciting the patient's chief concern with an open-ended question and then move through 3 nonlinear phases: open-ended elicitation, guided elicitation, and hypothesis-driven elicitation. Performing a comprehensive medical interview by obtaining background health information and the review of systems can help to expand or shrink the differential diagnosis. Clinicians should obtain information about specific symptoms and background information with a significant likelihood to narrow the differential diagnosis.

Advancing the assessment of clinical reasoning across the health professions: Definitional and methodologic recommendations.

The importance of clinical reasoning in patient care is well-recognized across all health professions. Validity evidence supporting high quality clinical reasoning assessment is essential to ensure health professional schools are graduating learners competent in this domain. However, through the course of a large scoping review, we encountered inconsistent terminology for clinical reasoning and inconsistent reporting of methodology, reflecting a somewhat fractured body of literature on clinical reasoning assessment. These inconsistencies impeded our ability to synthesize across studies and appropriately compare assessment tools. More specifically, we encountered: 1) a wide array of clinical reasoning-like terms that were rarely defined or informed by a conceptual framework, 2) limited details of assessment methodology, and 3) inconsistent reporting of the steps taken to establish validity evidence for clinical reasoning assessments. Consolidating our experience in conducting this review, we provide recommendations on key definitional and methodologic elements to better support the development, description, study, and reporting of clinical reasoning assessments.

Psychometric validation of the reconstructed version of the assessment of reasoning tool.

BACKGROUND: Assessing learners' competence in diagnostic reasoning is challenging and unstandardized in medical education. We developed a theory-informed, behaviorally anchored rubric, the Assessment of Reasoning Tool (ART), with content and response process validity. This study gathered evidence to support the internal structure and the interpretation of measurements derived from this tool. METHODS: We derived a reconstructed version of ART (ART-R) as a 15-item, 5-point Likert scale using the ART domains and descriptors. A psychometric evaluation was performed. We created 18 video variations of learner oral presentations, portraying different performance levels of the ART-R. RESULTS: 152 faculty viewed two videos and rated the learner globally and then using the ART-R. The confirmatory factor analysis showed a favorable comparative fit index = 0.99, root mean square error of approximation = 0.097, and standardized root mean square residual = 0.026. The five domains, hypothesis-directed information gathering, problem representation, prioritized differential diagnosis, diagnostic evaluation, and awareness of cognitive tendencies/emotional factors, had high internal consistency. The total score for each domain had a positive association with the global assessment of diagnostic reasoning. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide validity evidence for the ART-R as an assessment tool with five theoretical domains, internal consistency, and association with global assessment.

Teamwork in clinical reasoning - cooperative or parallel play?

Teamwork is fundamental for high-quality clinical reasoning and diagnosis, and many different individuals are involved in the diagnostic process. However, there are substantial gaps in how these individuals work as members of teams and, often, work is done in parallel, rather than in an integrated, collaborative fashion. In order to understand how individuals work together to create knowledge in the clinical context, it is important to consider social cognitive theories, including situated cognition and distributed cognition. In this article, the authors describe existing gaps and then describe these theories as well as common structures of teams in health care and then provide ideas for future study and improvement.

A situated cognition model for clinical reasoning performance assessment: a narrative review.

Background Clinical reasoning performance assessment is challenging because it is a complex, multi-dimensional construct. In addition, clinical reasoning performance can be impacted by contextual factors, leading to significant variation in performance. This phenomenon called context specificity has been described by social cognitive theories. Situated cognition theory, one of the social cognitive theories, posits that cognition emerges from the complex interplay of human beings with each other and the environment. It has been used as a valuable conceptual framework to explore context specificity in clinical reasoning and its assessment. We developed a conceptual model of clinical reasoning performance assessment based on situated cognition theory. In this paper, we use situated cognition theory and the conceptual model to explore how this lens alters the interpretation of articles or provides additional insights into the interactions between the assessee, patient, rater, environment, assessment method, and task. Methods We culled 17 articles from a systematic literature search of clinical reasoning performance assessment that explicitly or implicitly demonstrated a situated cognition perspective to provide an "enriched" sample with which to explore how contextual factors impact clinical reasoning performance assessment. Results We found evidence for dyadic, triadic, and quadratic interactions between different contextual factors, some of which led to dramatic changes in the assessment of clinical reasoning performance, even when knowledge requirements were not significantly different. Conclusions The analysis of the selected articles highlighted the value of a situated cognition perspective in understanding variations in clinical reasoning performance assessment. Prospective studies that evaluate the impact of modifying various contextual factors, while holding others constant, can provide deeper insights into the mechanisms by which context impacts clinical reasoning performance assessment.

The Management Script: A Practical Tool for Teaching Management Reasoning.

Management reasoning, a component of clinical reasoning, has become an important area for medical education research given its inherent complexity, role in medical decision making, and association with high-value care. Teaching management reasoning requires characterizing its core concepts and identifying strategies to teach them. In this Perspective, the authors propose the term "management script" to describe the mental schema that clinicians develop and use in medical decision making. Management scripts are high-level, precompiled, conceptual knowledge structures of the courses of action that a clinician may undertake to address a patient's health care problem(s). Like illness scripts, management scripts have foundational elements that are shared by most clinicians but are ultimately idiosyncratic based on each clinician's unique history of learning and experience. Applying management scripts includes 2 steps-(1) management script activation and (2) management option selection-which can occur reflexively (unconsciously) or deliberately (consciously), similar to, respectively, the System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking of dual process theory. Management scripts can be taught for different conditions by using management script templates, educational scaffolds that provide possible courses of action to address a health care problem at any stage. Just as learners use system-based or organ-based frameworks to generate a differential diagnosis, students can use a generic management script template early in training to develop management scripts for specific problems. Future research directions include exploring the role of management scripts in medical education and quality improvement practices.

Mapping clinical reasoning literature across the health professions: a scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Clinical reasoning is at the core of health professionals' practice. A mapping of what constitutes clinical reasoning could support the teaching, development, and assessment of clinical reasoning across the health professions. METHODS: We conducted a scoping study to map the literature on clinical reasoning across health professions literature in the context of a larger Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) review on clinical reasoning assessment. Seven databases were searched using subheadings and terms relating to clinical reasoning, assessment, and Health Professions. Data analysis focused on a comprehensive analysis of bibliometric characteristics and the use of varied terminology to refer to clinical reasoning. RESULTS: Literature identified: 625 papers spanning 47 years (1968-2014), in 155 journals, from 544 first authors, across eighteen Health Professions. Thirty-seven percent of papers used the term clinical reasoning; and 110 other terms referring to the concept of clinical reasoning were identified. Consensus on the categorization of terms was reached for 65 terms across six different categories: reasoning skills, reasoning performance, reasoning process, outcome of reasoning, context of reasoning, and purpose/goal of reasoning. Categories of terminology used differed across Health Professions and publication types. DISCUSSION: Many diverse terms were present and were used differently across literature contexts. These terms likely reflect different operationalisations, or conceptualizations, of clinical reasoning as well as the complex, multi-dimensional nature of this concept. We advise authors to make the intended meaning of 'clinical reasoning' and associated terms in their work explicit in order to facilitate teaching, assessment, and research communication.

Widening the lens on teaching and assessing clinical reasoning: from "in the head" to "out in the world".

Traditional teaching and assessment of clinical reasoning has focused on the individual clinician because of the preeminence of the information processing (IP) theory perspective. The clinician's mind has been viewed as the main source of effective or ineffective reasoning, and other participants, the environment and their interactions have been largely ignored. A social cognitive theoretical lens could enhance our understanding of how reasoning and error and the environment are linked. Therefore, a new approach in which the clinical reasoning process is situated and examined within the context may be required. The theories of embodied cognition, ecological psychology, situated cognition (SitCog) and distributed cognition (DCog) offer new insights to help the teacher and assessor enhance the quality of clinical reasoning instruction and assessment. We describe the teaching and assessment implications of clinical reasoning and error through the lens of this family of theories. Direct observation in different contexts focused on individual and team performance, simulation (with or without enhancement of technology), stimulated recall, think-aloud, and modeling are examples of teaching and assessment strategies grounded in this family of social cognitive theories. Educators may consider the instructional design of learning environments and educational tools that promote a situated educational approach to the teaching and assessment of clinical reasoning.

Clinical reasoning performance assessment: using situated cognition theory as a conceptual framework.

Developing valid assessment approaches to clinical reasoning performance has been challenging. Situated cognition theory posits that cognition (e.g. clinical reasoning) emerges from interactions between the clinician and situational (contextual) factors and recognizes an opportunity to gain deeper insights into clinical reasoning performance and its assessment through the study of these interactions. The authors apply situated cognition theory to develop a conceptual model to better understand the assessment of clinical reasoning. The model highlights how the interactions between six contextual factors, including assessee, patient, rater, and environment, assessment method, and task, can impact the outcomes of clinical reasoning performance assessment. Exploring the impact of these interactions can provide insights into the nature of clinical reasoning and its assessment. Three significant implications of this model are: (1) credible clinical reasoning performance assessment requires broad sampling of learners by expert raters in diverse workplace-based contexts; (2) contextual factors should be more explicitly defined and explored; and (3) non-linear statistical models are at times necessary to reveal the complex interactions that can impact clinical reasoning performance assessment.

Clinical Reasoning as a Core Competency.

Diagnostic error is a challenging problem; addressing it effectively will require innovation across multiple domains of health care, including medical education. Diagnostic errors often relate to problems with clinical reasoning, which involves the cognitive and relational steps up to and including establishing a diagnostic and therapeutic plan with a patient. However, despite a call from the National Academies of Sciences for medical educators to improve the teaching and assessment of clinical reasoning, the creation of explicit, theory-informed clinical reasoning curricula, faculty development resources, and assessment tools has proceeded slowly in both undergraduate and graduate medical education. To accelerate the development of this critical element of health professions education and to promote needed research and innovation in clinical reasoning education, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) should revise its core competencies to include clinical reasoning. The core competencies have proven to be an effective means of expanding educational innovation across the United States and ensuring buy-in across a diverse array of institutions and disciplines. Reformulating the ACGME core competencies to include clinical reasoning would spark much-needed educational innovation and scholarship in graduate medical education, as well as collaboration across institutions in this vital aspect of physicianship, and ultimately, could contribute to a reduction of patient suffering by better preparing trainees to build individual, team-based, and system-based tools to monitor for and avoid diagnostic error.