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Greater focus on higher order thinking

Practicum Script encourages users to verbally make their thinking visible to improve their critical judgment

By making clinical reasoning visible, we are providing more opportunities from which to build a meaningful learning.

In the middle of the year, Practicum Script will launch a new version of the platform, with a greater focus on thinking skills and more qualitative feedback, as well as a leap in navigation speed and design. But if one thing stands out, it is the new functionality to make thinking visible through an audio message. Soon, any student will be able to make their reasoning process explicit, which will allow them to learn from their own reflections.

Madrid, 13 February 2024. Mental processes for decision-making are like a "black box", full of automatisms and phenomena that are unconscious to the person performing the action and difficult for educators to understand and evaluate from an observable result or behaviour. By thinking or expressing themselves aloud, students externalise the ideas or concepts they have in mind, their way of interpreting and analysing information and their reasons and considerations for deciding on a certain approach. In this way, by making their thinking visible, students develop their own judgement and gain awareness of their cognitive abilities and knowledge.

In the new version of the simulator, students will have the option of spontaneously expressing the reasoning processes that have led them to formulate their hypotheses of approach in each of the cases that make up the Practicum Script clinical reasoning training programme. Specifically, they will have two minutes to express themselves orally and will be able to erase and start again, although the timer will continue to run. The aim is for them to gauge their level of understanding and critical judgement in the analysis of the situation presented and what cognitive resources they have brought into play in the heuristic reasoning stage. 

This recording will also be available during the step of comparing their hypotheses and arguments with those of the experts, as well as in the final review of the case, focusing on inductive thinking, and within the portfolio, to foster metacognitive learning. For the CEO of Practicum Script, Dr Eduardo Hornos, "the assimilation of content increases when students think through and with the information and concepts they are studying.” Moreover, "by making clinical reasoning visible, we are providing more opportunities from which to build reflective and self-regulated learning, accompanied, as always, by expert feedback.”

The idea of making thinking visible, coined with Harvard's Project Zero in the late 1960s, is concerned with the analytical, logical, conscious and explicit system of cognition, which follows the rapid thinking phase that is activated by the presentation of the clinical vignette. Practicum Script invites the participant to stop and think about how they have thought under the premise that learning is meaningful when it is the result of deep thinking and understanding associated with previous concepts and experiences and leads to the cognitive integration and accommodation of what is newly learned.

With the intention of providing a more effective feedback the teaching team will be able to access these audios in order to draw conclusions about possible knowledge gaps, inattention to key elements of the patient, or other factors that may lead students to cognitive failures. Ultimately," explains Dr Hornos, "this new functionality provides valuable input on the strengths and weaknesses of a given cohort of students or even a particular student and encourages adaptive learning, as well as opening the door to making the most of the debriefing and error deconstruction sessions conducted by tutors through Practicum Mentoring.”

We will soon announce other new features regarding design, navigation and feedback.

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