ArticleBMC medical education2020
Empirical comparison of three assessment instruments of clinical reasoning capability in 230 medical students.
Article in BMC medical education, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- In Support of Meaningful Assessment and Feedback: A Study of Clinical Reasoning Tasks Used in Ambulatory Case Reviews.Perspectives on medical education · 2026Article
- Transformation and articulation of clinical data to understand students' clinical reasoning: a scoping review.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Concept mapping to promote clinical reasoning in multimorbidity: a mixed methods study in undergraduate family medicine.BMC medical education · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundSeveral instruments intend to measure clinical reasoning capability, yet we lack evidence contextualizing their scores. The authors compared three clinical reasoning instruments [Clinical Reasoning Task (CRT), Patient Note Scoring rubric (PNS), and Summary Statement Assessment Rubric (SSAR)] using Messick's convergent validity framework in pre-clinical medical students. Scores were compared to a validated clinical reasoning instrument, Clinical Data Interpretation (CDI).
methodAuthors administered CDI and the first clinical case to 235 students. Sixteen randomly selected students (four from each CDI quartile) wrote a note on a second clinical case. Each note was scored with CRT, PNS, and SSAR. Final scores were compared to CDI.
resultsCDI scores did not significantly correlate with any other instrument. A large, significant correlation between PNS and CRT was seen (r = 0.71; p = 0.002).
conclusionsNone of the tested instruments outperformed the others when using CDI as a standard measure of clinical reasoning. Differing strengths of association between clinical reasoning instruments suggest they each measure different components of the clinical reasoning construct. The large correlation between CRT and PNS scoring suggests areas of novice clinical reasoning capability, which may not be yet captured in CDI or SSAR, which are weighted toward knowledge synthesis and hypothesis testing.
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