Assessment of the Impact of the Testing Effect Associated with Deliberate Reflection on Diagnostic Accuracy in Undergraduate Medical Students

• Grant number: 24/18713-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Bruno Augusto Goulart Campos
• Grantee: Julia Beatriz Aliscantes Silva Brito
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Médicas (FCM). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

: Clinical reasoning is the cognitive process that a physician establishes a diagnosis and propose a course of action in response to a clinical situation. This process is complex, and a physician's ability to perform it impacts the quality of patient care. Due the importance of clinical reasoning, there is a growing consensus that this skill should be actively taught in medical schools, and teaching strategies are emerging for this purpose. Deliberate reflection (DR) is one of the effective educational strategies for teaching clinical reasoning. It serves as a tool for organizing reasoning, following a series of steps until a diagnosis is chosen which improves diagnostic performance and reduces medical errors. During DR, participants can consult clinical case information to proceed step by step. However, there is evidence in the literature that active retrieval of information leads to better long-term content retention, known as the testing effect. Therefore, associating DR with the testing effect may yield promising results in improving diagnostic performance among students.