Thinking aloud as an instrument to develop clinical reasoning skills in physiotherapy students: a pilot study. (Italian)

Education of health professionals is a complicated process and teachers have to guide students to manage the clinical complexity, through clinical reasoning (CR). Professionals and students use different CR strategies, so tutoring activity helps the student to develop CR skills. This may be possible using a thinking aloud strategy, through conversation and dialogue with the teacher. The aim of this study was to investigate the preliminary effectiveness of the thinking aloud strategy in improving CR. 20 third-year physiotherapy students took part to the study during their internship. The control group wrote only a “Didactic Physiotherapy Record”(DPR); the experimental group was also administered an individual tutoring meeting, where the students were guided to reflect aloud on the patient and the rehabilitation treatment. Finally they produced a second DPR, based on what emerged during the meeting. Aloud CR improved the ability of framing the patient in a bio-psycho-social view and correlating functional impairment with potential causes. The improvement was better in the experimental group. This study represents an initial effectiveness test of the thinking aloud strategy in developing CR abilities. Further studies must be carried out to validate its effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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