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Physiotherapy Theory and Practice
An International Journal of Physical Therapy
Volume 38, 2022 - Issue 8
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Research Report

Interactive virtual scenarios as a technological resource to improve musculoskeletal clinical reasoning skills of undergraduate physiotherapy students

, ORCID Icon, , , & ORCID Icon
Pages 1016-1026 | Received 08 Aug 2019, Accepted 12 Jul 2020, Published online: 19 Aug 2020
 

ABSTRACT

Background

Clinical reasoning is a fundamental competency in the learning process of health professionals. Since learning with traditional methods presents difficulties, teaching with interactive virtual scenarios is a good alternative.

Objective

To describe the impact of a blended training with interactive virtual scenarios for the development of clinical reasoning skills in undergraduate physiotherapy students.

Methods

A sample of 92 students solved eight storylines. Assessment error percentage, clinical pattern recognition, satisfaction, and the perception of difficulty were obtained. A proportions test was used to compare baseline and final assessments. To analyze the relationship between the variables, multilevel univariate logistic regression models were built.

Results

A significant difference was observed in the error percentage between baseline and final assessment (p < .001). Comparing the last storyline to the first one, there were 2.63 times more possibilities to correctly recognize the pattern. The error percentage was associated with the opportunity to recognize the pattern precisely (p < .001). Thus, for each increasing unit in the error percentage, the possibility to correctly recognize the pattern decreased by 11% (OR = 0.89).

Conclusions

The use of this innovative blended training with virtual scenarios allowed students to systematically improve their recognition abilities of clinical patterns and decrease mistakes in the decision-making process.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile under Grant INNOVADOC 2019.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile [INNOVADOC 2019].

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