The stress paradox: how stress can be good for learning.

Context: This article explores the myth that stress is always bad for learning. The term "stress" has been narrowed by habitual use to equate with the negative outcome of distress; this article takes an alternative view that ultimately rejects the myth that demonises stress. The avoidance of distress is important, but a broader view of stress as something that can have either positive or negative outcomes is considered.

Teaching clinical reasoning by making thinking visible: an action research project with allied health clinical educators.

Background: Clinical reasoning is fundamental to all forms of professional health practice, however it is also difficult to teach and learn because it is complex, tacit, and effectively invisible for students. In this paper we present an approach for teaching clinical reasoning based on making expert thinking visible and accessible to students.

Methods: Twenty-one experienced allied health clinical educators from three tertiary Australian hospitals attended up to seven action research discussion sessions, where they developed a tentative heuristic of their own clinical reasoning, trialled it with students, evaluated if it helped their students to reason clinically, and then refined it so the heuristic was targeted to developing each student's reasoning skills.