teaching clinical reasoning among undergraduate medical students: a crossover randomized trial

Background & objective: many clinical reasoning teaching techniques have been reported in the literature. the authors focused on 2 teaching techniques of clinical reasoning, the technique summarize, narrow, analyze, probe the preceptor, plan, self-selected topic (snapps) and the clinical reasoning technique (crt), and compared their efficiency to improve the clinical reasoning competencies of third-year undergraduate medical students.materials & methods: the authors performed a prospective randomized, controlled, non-blinded crossover trial including year-3 undergraduate medical students. judgment criteria consisted of the scores attributed to a test assessing the cognitive competencies of the participants which was a structured summary performed by the students after each session. besides, a satisfaction likert-scale questionnaire was fulfilled by the students. statistical analysis was performed using spss software (version 20.0).results: seventy-two students were included with a mean age of 21.03 (sd:2,30) years. the mean scores of the students allocated to the crt arm reached 4.62 (sd:2.93)versus 4.99 (sd:2.93) for the snapps arm. no significant statistical difference was observed between the mean scores according to the method used. the analysis of the satisfaction questionnaire revealed that 75% of the students preferred crt because of the collaborative work performed.conclusion: this study highlights the need for varying techniques to improve the critical reasoning skills of medical students. besides, it pointed out students’ preference for collaborative approaches illustrating socio-constructivist theories of learning.