Fostering Clinical-Reasoning Skills in Physical Therapist Students Through an Interactive Learning Module Designed in the Moodle Learning Management System

What methods are being used to teach clinical reasoning in physical therapy education and are they effective? A systematic review of literature

“…of the 12 articles selected for this review, 10 were quantitative studies [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and 2 were qualitative studies [19,20]. The quantitative studies included 1 randomised controlled trial, 5 pretest/posttest design studies with control, and 4 posttest design studies with no controls.…”

“…Eleven of the studies assessed only PT students, while 1 study assessed PT along with students from other allied health professions including medicine, pharmacy, occupational therapy and physician assistant [9]. Four of the studies involved 'pre-clinical' PT students [9,12,14,18]; 1 study involved 'pre-clinical' MPT students [10]; 3 studies involved final year dPT/PT students [11,15,20] [17,19]; 1 study involved 2 nd year physiotherapy students [16]; and 1 study involved dPT students in an undefined year in the academic program [13].…”

“…Quality review assessment utilising the MERSQi Score yielded a mean score of 9.33 for all quantitative articles with a range of 6-13. only one of the quantitative studies was a randomised control trial [10], and only 5 of the studies had total MERSQi scores of 10 or greater [9,11,12,14,15]. All but two [11,16] of the studies measured participant satisfaction, attitude, perception, opinion, or general facts as opposed to measuring knowledge or skills.…”

“…Within the accepted studies, clinical reasoning was assessed using a variety of measures, including student selfassessment of clinical reasoning, faculty assessment of clinical reasoning performance, and qualitative assessment of clinical reasoning strategies. Eight [9, 10, 12-15, 17, 18] out of 10 of the quantitative studies relied on student self-assessment of perceived clinical reasoning ability, of which three articles [9,12,14] utilised the Self-Assessment of Clinical Reflection and Reasoning (SACRR); three articles [10,13,17] utilised a researcher-created survey to measure the students' perception of their clinical reasoning ability, one [15] article used the Reasoning for Change (R4C), and one used the SACRR and the diagnostic Thinking inventory (dTi) [18]. in two studies, researchers assessed actual clinical reasoning performance.…”

“…Six of the studies used structured case activities in a variety of ways [10,12,13,16,18,20]. Seif et al [12] asked students to participate individually in a Moodle Lesson that included viewing a video of a patient interview followed by guided questions, performing a literature search and article reviews, and developing a home exercise program.…”