Medical students' biomedical and clinical knowledge: Combining longitudinal design, eye tracking and comparison with residents' performance

Abstract

This study combines longitudinal and individual process-level analyses to investigate medical students' biomedical knowledge and how they generate a diagnosis for a patient case text. The diagnostic processes were investigated using the eye-tracking method, and students' processes were compared with those of residents. The results showed that students differed in their diagnostic performance in the beginning of the clinical phase. Of the students who had biomedical misconceptions in the preclinical phase, 69% ended up with an incorrect diagnosis, while 60% of students with accurate biomedical knowledge made a correct diagnosis. The processing of a patient case text was faster among better-achieving students and residents. Furthermore, residents' illness-script activation could be seen from their eye-movement data as a relatively longer reading time regarding the sentence that concerned the enabling condition of the case. Based on the results of the study, pedagogical suggestions are discussed.