Clinical sensemaking: Advancing a conceptual learning model of clinical reasoning.

Context: Much remains unanswered regarding how clinical reasoning is learned in the clinical environment. This study attempts to unravel how novice medical students learn to reason, by examining how they make sense of the clinical patient encounter.

Method: The current study was part of a greater research project employing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) to develop a learning model of clinical reasoning.

Faculty development participants' experiences of working with change in clinical settings.

Objectives: Many universities offer faculty development to support teachers in developing and improving clinical education in the health professions. Although research shows outcomes on individual levels after faculty development, little is known about its contribution to change within the organisation. To advance current faculty development and ensure that it can support wider educational change in healthcare organisations, a better understanding of educational change practices in these settings is needed.

Study Engagement and Burnout of the PhD Candidates in Medicine: A Person-Centered Approach.

This study focused on exploring individual variations in doctoral candidates' well-being, in terms of experienced research engagement and burnout by using a person-centered approach. In addition, the associations between well-being profiles and gender, country of origin, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status and drop-out intentions were explored. The participants were 692 PhD candidates in the field of medicine.

Representation, interaction and interpretation. Making sense of the context in clinical reasoning.

Background: All thinking occurs in some sort of context, rendering the relation between context and clinical reasoning a matter of significant interest. Context, however, has a notoriously vague and contested meaning. A profound disagreement exists between different research traditions studying clinical reasoning in how context is understood.

Collaborative knotworking - transforming clinical teaching practice through faculty development.

Background: Faculty development is important for advancing teaching practice in health professions education. However, little is known regarding how faculty development outcomes are achieved and how change in practice may happen through these activities. In this study, we explored how clinical educators integrated educational innovations, developed within a faculty development programme, into their clinical workplaces.

Unravelling the polyphony in clinical reasoning research in medical education.

Rationale: Clinical reasoning lies at the heart of medical practice and has a long research tradition. Nevertheless, research is scattered across diverse academic disciplines with different research traditions in a wide range of scientific journals. This polyphony is a source of conceptual confusion.

Grounding judgement in context: A conceptual learning model of clinical reasoning.

Context: Contemporary research on clinical reasoning focuses on cognitive problem-solving processes. However, the decisive role that clinical context plays in clinical reasoning is often overlooked. We explored how novice learners make sense of the patient encounter in the clinical situation.

Contradictions in clinical teachers' engagement in educational development: an activity theory analysis.

Many medical universities offer educational development activities to support clinical teachers in their teaching role. Research has focused on the scope and effectiveness of such activities and on why individual teachers attend. However, systemic perspectives that go beyond a focus on individual participants are scarce in the existing literature.

How do tutors intervene when conflicts on knowledge arise in tutorial groups?

Recent research on problem-based learning (PBL) has shown that students need support when dealing with conflicting ideas in PBL-tutorial discussions. In the present study, we examined tutor facilitation during tutorial discussions, and particularly how the facilitation helped students to collaboratively resolve conflicts on knowledge. The study involved four PBL-tutorial sessions that included altogether 33 first-year medical and dental students.

Dealing with conflicts on knowledge in tutorial groups.

The aim of our study was to gain understanding of different types of conflicts on knowledge in the discussions of problem-based learning tutorial groups, and how such conflicts are dealt with. We examined first-year medical and dental students' (N = 33) conflicts on knowledge in four videotaped reporting phase tutorials. A coding scheme was created for analysing verbatim transcripts of 43 conflict episodes in order to find out whether the conflict episodes were about factual or conceptual knowledge and how the students elaborated the knowledge.

Motivating medical students to learn teamwork skills.

Background: This study examined teaching teamwork skills to first-year medical students. Teamwork skills focused on verbal communication in PBL-tutorial sessions and in healthcare teams.

Aims: The aim was to find out how to teach teamwork skills to first-year medical students and how to motivate them to learn these skills.

MED NORD--A tool for measuring medical students' well-being and study orientations.

Background: The relationship between medical students' well-being, motivation, and their conceptions of learning and knowledge has not been previously explored.

Aims: This study aimed to validate a research instrument intending to measure medical students' (n = 280) (1) experiences of stress, anxiety and disinterest, (2) motivational (thinking) strategies, (3) conceptions of learning and knowledge (epistemologies), and (4) approaches to learning.

Methods: We developed an instrument, MED NORD, which is a composition of scales measuring different theoretical constructs that previously have shown good predictive value, validity and reliability.

Medical undergraduate students' beliefs and attitudes toward pain: how do they mature?

At the University of Helsinki, pain-related topics are taught throughout medical studies but without a formal pain curriculum. The purpose of this study was to assess medical students' attitudes towards pain. A questionnaire using a 6-point Likert scale was constructed to measure pain-related attitudes and beliefs described in previous studies.

On the relationship between group functioning and study success in problem-based learning.

Introduction: In problem-based learning (PBL), discussion in the tutorial group plays a central role in stimulating student learning. Problems are the principal input for stimulating discussion. The quality of discussion is assumed to influence student learning and, in the end, study success.