Coaching questions to facilitate clinical decision-making and clinical reasoning with students
To facilitate clinical decision-making and clinical reasoning skills, student supervisors should consider the questions that they ask themselves. These questions have value as a teaching and scaffolding tool as they can provide concrete examples of the thinking steps that underpin clinical reasoning. This can assist students to make the 'jump' from data gathering to making clinical decisions on diagnosis and treatment.
'Delaney, Golding and Bialocerkowski (2013) in 'Teaching for thinking in clinical education: Making explicit the thinking involved in allied health clinical reasoning' developed a series of questions that can be used by student supervisors to enable students to think and reason like expert health professionals. Students can also use these questions as a self-reflection activity to increase clinical reasoning skills.
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Clinical role - Questions students can address to determine their clinical role
Knowledge: Questions students can address to isolate relevant clinical knowledge
Teaching for thinking in clinical education
Patient perspective: Questions students can address to integrate the patient narrative and context with their clinical knowledge
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Other resources to support student clinical reasoning
- Clinical Reasoning Tip Sheet
- An Evidence-based practice learning and assessment framework for clinicians working with students on placement (Charles Sturt University)
References:
- Delany, C., Golding, C., & Bialocerkowski, A. (2013). Teaching for thinking in clinical education: Making explicit the thinking involved in allied health clinical reasoning. Focus on Health Professional Education, 14(2), 44–56. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.344079003268797Christiansen, C., & Baum, C. (1997). Enabling function and well-being (2nd ed.). Thorofare: Slack
