Workshop: Helping undergraduate medical students to improve their clinical reasoning in the direct patient encounter - skills for tutors

Workshop Description: This workshop demonstrates how clinical consultations can be used in a structured way to facilitate student understanding of their own clinical reasoning. Participants will actively explore, analyse and practise some of the skills needed for facilitating students’ learning of clinical reasoning.Workshop Objectives: Following the workshop participants will be able to: • Recognise opportunities to strengthen the teaching of clinical reasoning within their environment • Evaluate students’ individual clinical reasoning learning needs • Identify new opportunities for patient participation in clinical reasoning teaching • Discuss current opinion about teaching and learning clinical reasoning • Reflect on their personal experience of learning and teaching clinical reasoning

Supporting primary school students' reasoning about motion graphs through physical experiences

Reasoning about graphical representations representing dynamic data (e.g., distance changing over time), including interpreting, creating, changing, combining, and comparing graphs, can be considered a domain-specific operationalization of the general twenty-first century skills of creative, critical thinking and solving problems. This paper addresses the issue of how these 21st century skills of interpreting and creating graphs can be supported in a six-lesson teaching sequence about graphing motion. In this teaching sequence, we focused on the potential of an embodied learning environment to facilitate the development of primary school students’ reasoning about motion graphs by having primary school students (9–11 years) ‘walk’ graphs in front of a motion sensor to generate distance-time graphs. We asked: How does students’ reasoning about graphing motion develop over a six-lesson teaching sequence within an embodied learning environment? Based on the collected data, we examined changes in students’ level of reasoning on graph interpretation and graph construction tasks using a repeated measurement design. Additionally, we present two teaching episodes showing instances of how perceptual-motor experiences during the lessons aided students’ reasoning about graphical representations of motion. Results show that students went from iconic understanding towards understanding in which they reasoned based on one or two variables when interpreting and constructing graphical representations of motion events. At these higher levels of reasoning these students showed understanding of modelling motion in line with the intended 21st century skills of generating, refining, and evaluating graphs.publishedVersionPaid Open Acces

The effect of multiple knowledge sources on learning and teaching

Current paradigms for machine-based learning and teaching tend to perform their task in isolation from a rich context of existing knowledge. In contrast, the research project presented here takes the view that bringing multiple sources of knowledge to bear is of central importance to learning in complex domains. As a consequence teaching must both take advantage of and beware of interactions between new and existing knowledge. The central process which connects learning to its context is reasoning by analogy, a primary concern of this research. In teaching, the connection is provided by the explicit use of a learning model to reason about the choice of teaching actions. In this learning paradigm, new concepts are incrementally refined and integrated into a body of expertise, rather than being evaluated against a static notion of correctness. The domain chosen for this experimentation is that of learning to solve "algebra story problems." A model of acquiring problem solving skills in this domain is described, including: representational structures for background knowledge, a problem solving architecture, learning mechanisms, and the role of analogies in applying existing problem solving abilities to novel problems. Examples of learning are given for representative instances of algebra story problems. After relating our views to the psychological literature, we outline the design of a teaching system. Finally, we insist on the interdependence of learning and teaching and on the synergistic effects of conducting both research efforts in parallel

Physiotherapy students\u27 perceptions and experiences of clinical prediction rules

Objectives: Clinical reasoning can be difficult to teach to pre-professional physiotherapy students due to their lack of clinical experience. It may be that tools such as clinical prediction rules (CPRs) could aid the process, but there has been little investigation into their use in physiotherapy clinical education. This study aimed to determine the perceptions and experiences of physiotherapy students regarding CPRs, and whether they are learning about CPRs on clinical placement. Design: Cross-sectional survey using a paper-based questionnaire. Participants: Final year pre-professional physiotherapy students (n=371, response rate 77%) from five universities across five states of Australia. Results: Sixty percent of respondents had not heard of CPRs, and a further 19% had not clinically used CPRs. Only 21% reported using CPRs, and of these nearly three-quarters were rarely, if ever, learning about CPRs in the clinical setting. However most of those who used CPRs (78%) believed CPRs assisted in the development of clinical reasoning skills and none (0%) was opposed to the teaching of CPRs to students. The CPRs most commonly recognised and used by students were those for determining the need for an X-ray following injuries to the ankle and foot (67%), and for identifying deep venous thrombosis (63%). Conclusions: The large majority of students in this sample knew little, if anything, about CPRs and few had learned about, experienced or practiced them on clinical placement. However, students who were aware of CPRs found them helpful for their clinical reasoning and were in favour of learning more about them

SECONDARY SCHOOL MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS ABOUT INDUCTIVE REASONING AND THEIR INTERPRETATION IN TEACHING

Inductive reasoning is an essential tool for teaching mathematics to generate knowledge, solve problems, and make generalizations. However, little research has been done on inductive reasoning as it applies to teaching mathematical concepts in secondary school. Therefore, the study explores secondary school teachers’ perceptions of inductive reasoning and interprets this mathematical reasoning type in teaching the quadratic equation. The data were collected from a questionnaire administered to 22 teachers and an interview conducted to expand their answers. Through the thematic analysis method, it was found that more than half the teachers perceived inductive reasoning as a process for moving from the particular to the general and as a way to acquire mathematical knowledge through questioning. Because teachers have little clarity about inductive phases and processes, they expressed confusion about teaching the quadratic equation inductively. Results indicate that secondary school teachers need professional learning experiences geared towards using inductive reasoning processes and tasks to form concepts and generalizations in mathematics

Learning to Teach Mathematics with Reasoning and Sense Making

This study uses teacher research to examine teacher learning in the context of instructional coaching. The author, a mathematics instructional coach, engaged in an intense three-week coaching relationship with a high school Algebra teacher. A detailed description of the teaching and learning of quadratics that took place during this research provide information about what and how a teacher learns to teach mathematics with reasoning and sense making. Mapping the terrain of quadratics deepened the teacher’s understanding of the mathematical content and encouraged him to adapt his textbook in order to build mathematical reasoning. Through the coaching process, the teacher also enhanced his specialized content knowledge and developed pedagogical reasoning skills when faced with teaching dilemmas. Finally, a discussion about instructional coaching considers an instructional coach’s role in regard to teacher learning. Adviser: Ruth M. Heato

Enhancing OTD Clinical Studies Course Curriculum

This capstone project aimed to build upon the foundation of the Belmont School of Occupational Therapy clinical studies course curriculum. Project goals included conducting surveys of current students regarding their opinions of the courses for preparing fieldwork readiness skills, creating and piloting learning activities, and informing current faculty about best practices for teaching clinical reasoning skills. This project culminated with the production of an educational handout summarizing current literature regarding teaching professional reasoning skills, multiple learning activities implemented in lectures, and data synthesis of surveys conducted

Conceptualising An Approach To Clinical Reasoning In The Education Profession

An increasing number of teaching qualifications are underpinned by the concept of clinical practice (Alter & Coggshall, 2009; McLean Davies et al., 2013) and draw on clinical education research in the health professions. Teaching as a clinical practice profession is an emergent approach in teacher education. Clinical practice is not a wholesale shift in approach; rather it is a change in perspective that has the capacity to create changes in thinking about learning and teaching. The concept of clinical reasoning presented in this paper is offered as a key element in teacher education that requires greater emphasis. By moving away from apprenticeship and craft frameworks of teaching that were prevalent in teacher education (Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles, & Lopez-Torres, 2003), this approach to clinical reasoning can produce teachers who are better able to articulate their reasoning for pedagogical choices drawing on both school-based and research-based evidence so as to improve their own teaching and improve the teaching of others