Guessing right - whether and how medical students give incorrect reasons for their correct diagnoses.

Clinical reasoning is one of the central competencies in everyday clinical practice. Diagnostic competence is often measured based on diagnostic accuracy. It is implicitly assumed that a correct diagnosis is based on a proper diagnostic process, although this has never been empirically tested.

Scaffolding clinical reasoning of medical students with virtual patients: effects on diagnostic accuracy, efficiency, and errors.

Background Understanding clinical reasoning is a major challenge in medical education research. Little is known about the influence of scaffolding and feedback on the clinical reasoning of medical students. The aim of this study was to measure the effects of problem representation (cognitive representation of a clinical case) and structured scaffolding for reflection with or without feedback on the diagnostic efficiency and characterization of diagnostic errors of medical students.