A Novel Educational Tool for Teaching Diagnostic Reasoning and Laboratory Data Interpretation to Veterinary (and Medical) Students

Abstract

The Diagnostic Pathfinder was designed to help students learn diagnostic problem solving by supporting them in explaining relationships among history and physical examination findings, data abnormalities, and the underlying mechanisms of disease. The Pathfinder has been used to teach diagnostic problem solving to veterinary students since 2001 and is currently in use at 10 colleges of veterinary medicine. This article describes how the Pathfinder works and summarizes results from studies exploring the effect of Pathfinder use on learning and satisfaction. Pathfinder characteristics are described in terms of their influence on cognitive load, and strategies are provided for effective implementation.

Developing an online system to support algebra progress monitoring: Teacher use and feedback

“…The online system for the current project was developed using an existing tool (i.e., ThinkSpace 1 ) to support casebased and critical thinking instruction in higher education (Danielson et al, 2007;Bender and Danielson, 2011;Kruzich, 2013;Wolff et al, 2017). The PD system included two hubs, which are separate features of the system navigable to and from the homepage.…”

“…The development of the online PD and data management system was led by the faculty member who originally developed ThinkSpace (Bender and Danielson, 2011). Following his retirement, a small company took over the development leading to the version used in this paper and in a subsequent research project.…”

The readiness assurance process in online team‐based learning classrooms

“…However, the engaging content by itself may not be enough to ensure that students, who are raised in a system predominated by lectures and memorization, are adequately prepared to tackle the problem solving that is integral to TBL. Some TBL practitioners are filling this gap by assigning prework in programs such as ThinkSpace (https://think.thinkspace.org) that can break‐up a complex problem into small pieces and step students through a scaffolded process with immediate expert feedback (Bender & Danielson, 2011). Supported by Ericsson's work on expertise development (Ericsson, 2014), this approach has yielded significant learning gains (Danielson et al., 2007) and helps bring students up to par and ready to tackle the problem solving in the application exercises.…”

Engaging students with team‐based learning in courses taught at two campuses synchronously: Two case studies in health sciences

“…Veterinary students prepared for each module by reading a chapter in the textbook and working through the diagnostic rationale of clinical cases using the open-source computer program ThinkSpace, (Bender & Danielson, 2011) at a pace of about six cases per week. Because the ISU College of Veterinary Medicine has a traditional lecture-based culture and homework assignments outpaced their other classes, eliminating lectures was not an option.…”