An educational model for undergraduate psychiatry students to promote clinical diagnostic reasoning

In this paper we describe an educational model for undergraduate psychiatry students. In the proposed model, the contents of clinical cases are drawn from patients' clinical data stored in the electronic medical records of the hospital. Teachers can develop a variety of learning materials and tasks based on real clinical cases, related to a variety of specific mental disorders. The clinical cases are presented to the students in an interactive format, to stimulate and enhance self-regulated learning as well as collaboration among students. The training model aims to develop and improve effective clinical reasoning skills in psychiatry students, through practicing the diagnostic skills and the competences of treatment definition of the principal psychiatric disorders previously studied from a theoretical point of view. To reach this objective, a collaborative training environment has been defined to reproduce each phase of the diagnosis process. During each phase, students are guided in carrying out individual and collaborative tasks, and they receive feedback from teachers about their performance. This work is based on the assumption that case-based learning programs represent an effective learning methodology for medical students. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.