Seeing beyond variables: applying a person-centered approach to identifying regulation strategy profiles among Finnish preclinical medical and dental students.

BACKGROUND: High-quality learning during medical school and beyond requires appropriate study strategies and taking responsibility for one's studies, thus self-regulation of one's learning. In contrast to traditional studies focusing on a variable-centered approach, a person-centered approach to regulation strategies was utilized. METHODS: The participants were 162 Finnish medical and dental students who answered the regulation scale of the Inventory of Learning Styles at three measurement points. First, the functionality of the scale was analyzed in Finnish medical education context. Latent profile analyses were used to examine regulation strategy profiles. Last, the connections of these profiles with the study success were investigated. RESULTS: The analyses yielded a three-factor solution, which was reliable across time. Four profiles of regulation strategies were identified and they were found to be connected to study success: Students with the lowest self-regulation and increasing lack of regulation performed worse than the other groups. CONCLUSION: The use of a person-centered approach along with variable-centered approach increases understanding of the complex nature of learning in higher education. Person-centered approach could be used as a tool for supporting student learning and to help early diagnosing of learning difficulties, since it enables individualization of students with different regulation strategy profiles.

Exploring eye movements of experienced and novice readers of medical texts concerning the cardiovascular system in making a diagnosis.

This study used the eye-tracking method to explore how the level of expertise influences reading, and solving, two written patient cases on cardiac failure and pulmonary embolus. Eye-tracking is a fairly commonly used method in medical education research, but it has been primarily applied to studies analyzing the processing of visualizations, such as medical images or patient video cases. Third-year medical students (n = 39) and residents (n = 13) read two patient case texts in an eye-tracking laboratory. The analysis focused on the diagnosis made, the total visit duration per text slide, and eye-movement indicators regarding task-relevant and task-redundant areas of the patient case text. The results showed that almost all participants (48/52) made the correct diagnosis of the first patient case, whereas all the residents, but only 17 students, correctly diagnosed the second case. The residents were efficient patient-case-solvers: they reached the correct diagnoses, and processed the cases faster and with a lower number of fixations than did the students. Further, the students and residents demonstrated different reading patterns with regard to which slides they proportionally paid most attention. The observed differences could be utilized in medical education to model expert reasoning and to teach the manner in which a good medical text is constructed. Eye-tracking methodology appears to have a great deal of potential in evaluating performance and growing diagnostic expertise in reading medical texts. However, further research using medical texts as stimuli is required. Anat Sci Educ 10: 23-33. © 2016 American Association of Anatomists.

Identifying User Interaction Patterns in E-Textbooks.

We introduce a new architecture for e-textbooks which contains two navigational aids: an index and a concept map. We report results from an evaluation in a university setting with 99 students. The interaction sequences of the users were captured during the user study. We found several clusters of user interaction types in our data. Three separate user types were identified based on the interaction sequences: passive user, term clicker, and concept map user. We also discovered that with the concept map interface users started to interact with the application significantly sooner than with the index interface. Overall, our findings suggest that analysis of interaction patterns allows deeper insights into the use of e-textbooks than is afforded by summative evaluation.

A follow-up study of medical students' biomedical understanding and clinical reasoning concerning the cardiovascular system.

Novice medical students usually hold initial conceptions concerning medical domains, such as the cardiovascular system, which may contradict scientific explanations and thus hinder learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate which kinds of biomedical representations medical students constructed of the central cardiovascular system in their first and second years of study, and how the quality of these representations was related to the students' success in clinical reasoning. Data for 119 medical students were collected in three phases: in the first year of study before and after a cardiovascular course and a follow-up in the second year of study. Biomedical and clinical assignments were utilised. The study revealed that students had a substantial number of different misconceptions, and they decreased only slightly over the period of instruction. Those students who had misconceptions concerning biomedical knowledge also performed poorly in clinical reasoning. Furthermore, those students whose clinical reasoning was excellent had improved their biomedical knowledge between the first and second year remarkably more than students with poorer clinical reasoning. Hence, biomedical understanding seems to act as a mediator in clinical reasoning among novice students. We suggest that domain-specific pedagogical training, which would help medical educators become aware of students' typical misconceptions concerning biomedical knowledge and the role of this knowledge in clinical reasoning, should be carried out to improve medical education.