Modification of nstudy software for supporting and assessing clinical reasoning skills in equine surgery

Abstract EN

nStudy, a web-based online learning program, was developed to bridge the gap between the classroom and clinic by developing the clinical reasoning skills of veterinary students.

Literature-based clinical reasoning scaffolds were developed to adapt the design of nStudy to support and analyze the regulatory processes of clinical reasoning in the context of equine surgery.

Twenty-three students from faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Damanhour University were recruited for this study.

The integrated scaffolds and prompts of the clinical reasoning within nStudy were significantly correlated and predictive for students’ learning gain.

Process mining (PM) technique was applied to modeling sequences of clinical reasoning learning action patterns that have been recorded in log files.

PM provided additional information on the effects of nStudy scaffolds that could not be revealed by a simple analysis of frequencies of learning actions.

Using PM technique to deconstruct the clinical reasoning into component parts and processes can help the educator’s assessment to focus on a learner’s reasoning deficit and provide immediate feedback.

The present study lays the groundwork for future research into developing the updated version of nStudy to provide the adaptive scaffolds necessary to foster the clinical reasoning of students’ learning and assess the reasoning deficit of learners.