Effects of reflection and immediate feedback to improve clinical reasoning of medical students in the assessment of dermatologic conditions: a randomised controlled trial

Background There are few studies that directly compared different interventions to improve medical students’ clinical reasoning for dermatologic conditions. Objective To investigate the effectiveness of adding practice with reflection and immediate feedback on traditional dermatology electives in improving medical students’ ability in evaluating skin lesions. Methods The participants were fourth-year medical students of Seoul National University College of Medicine, Korea, who were enrolled to take a 2-week dermatology elective course ( n = 87). Students were assigned to one of the three educational interventions: 2-h training involving 10 written clinical cases (experimental); 1-h lecture and 1-h outpatient clinic (lecture); and 2-h outpatient clinic (no intervention). Before and at the end of rotation, diagnostic accuracy was estimated using 20 written clinical cases with photographs (10 novel cases presented in diagnostic training [training set], 10 cases with diagnoses not included in training [control set]). Results There was a significant interaction effect of intervention×set×time. A post hoc analysis indicated that the students in the experimental group outperformed students in the other two groups only in the training set of the final tests; after completing the 2-week rotation, for the training set, the mean score was higher in the experimental group (7.5 ± 1.3) than in the lecture (5.7 ± 1.6) and no intervention (5.6 ± 1.3) groups, producing an effect size of 1.2 standard deviation (SD) and 1.5 SD, respectively. Conclusion Practicing written clinical cases with reflection and feedback is superior to a lecture-based approach and yields additional benefits to a dermatology elective, thereby enhancing medical students’ ability to accurately diagnose skin lesions. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov , NCT03472001 . Registered 21 March 2018.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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