Evaluation of Clinical Reasoning Learning in Hospital Internships: Experience of General Surgery Clerkship in the Oued Ed-Dahab Military Hospital, Morocco

Abstract

The clinical reasoning process is a key element in a physician’s daily practice. Clinical reasoning learning (CRL) is a student-centered educational tool designed to promote early learning of clinical reasoning through expert-assessed simulation of a clinical environment. Our aim was to evaluate third year medical students’ satisfaction with the CRL sessions in general surgery and to show the improvement of their clinical reasoning thanks to this method. Our work is a descriptive cross-sectional study that was conducted between October 2020 and July 2022 at the Oued Ed-Dahab Military Hospital of Agadir, Morocco. Our sample was randomly selected and collected through a feedback questionnaire based on students’ personal experiences. We performed a descriptive data analysis using the Jamovi software. The questionnaire was completed by 60.6% of students (n = 154). The female participation was 60.4%, and the median age was 22 [22; 23]. The learner satisfaction data indicated that 63.6% of the students preferred this new framework over the standard teaching methods. 90.3% of them considered the CRL sessions to be a real source of motivation for learning medicine, and 89.6% of them reported a high self-efficacy in practicing theoretical knowledge. CRL is a teaching approach that was well perceived by our participants. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use this method to promote critical reasoning among medical students to enhance their knowledge and subsequently use it in a meaningful way.