How Can Students’ Diagnostic Competence Benefit Most From Practice With Clinical Cases? The Effects of Structured Reflection on Future Diagnosis of the Same and Novel Diseases

Abstract

Structured reflection while practicing with cases enhanced learning of diagnosis both of the diseases practiced and of their alternative diagnoses, suggesting that reflection not only enriched mental representations of diseases practiced relative to more conventional approaches to clinical learning but also influenced the representations of adjacent but different diseases. Structured reflection seems a useful addition to the existing clinical teaching methods.