The clinical reasoning skills of Speech and Language Therapy students.

Difficulties experienced by novices in clinical reasoning have been well documented in many fields, especially medicine (Elstein et al., 1978; Patel and Groen, 1986; Boshuizen and Schmidt, 1992, 2000; Rikers et al., 2004). These studies have shown that novice clinicians have difficulties with both knowledge and strategy in clinical reasoning tasks. Speech and language therapy students must also learn to reason clinically, yet to date there is little evidence of how they learn to do so. In this paper, we report the clinical reasoning difficulties of a group of speech and language therapy students. We make a comparison with experienced speech and language therapists reasoning and propose some methods and materials to aid the development of clinical reasoning in speech and language therapy students

Vicarious learning and case-based teaching: developing health science students' clinical reasoning skills

Developing expertise in clinical reasoning and diagnosis poses an enormous challenge to health science students. In a three-phase project, we identified the difficulties that health science students in initial training have with clinical reasoning, designed and implemented an online vicarious learning system to address those difficulties, and evaluated the outcomes in terms of learners' experiences, diagnostic skill development and use of professional language