Modification of nstudy Software for Supporting and Assessing Clinical Reasoning Skills in Equine Surgery

Abstract

The nStudy, a web-based online learning program, was developed to bridge the gap between the classroom and clinic by developing and assessing the clinical reasoning skills of veterinary students. Literature-based clinical reasoning scaffolds were developed to adapt the design of nStudy to support clinical reasoning skills specifically in the context of equine surgery. Process mining (PM) technique was applied to modelling sequences of clinical reasoning learning action patterns. 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 in the future.