ArticleMedical science educator2025
Causal Mechanistic Reasoning as a Tool to Explore Medical Students' Predictions of Pharmacology Phenomenon: Connecting Core Concepts with Clinical Applications.
Article in Medical science educator, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Pharmacology educators as leaders of programmatic assessment for safe prescribing in competency-based medical education.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Prior research in education has identified that causal mechanistic reasoning (CMR) can enhance understanding of causal relationships and support the construction of explanations and predictions. However, the literature lacks information about how CMR is used among medical students or in pharmacology education. This study investigated how medical students utilize CMR to predict and explain adverse drug effects (ADE) as a pharmacological phenomenon. Methods: Pre-clerkship osteopathic medical students enrolled at a large American university were asked to predict and explain their reasoning related to adverse effects caused by SGLT2 inhibitors. Their responses guided the development of a coding scheme to characterize the degree to which students used CMR. Pearson's chi-squared tests were applied to analyze the presence and strength of the relationships between overall ADE predictions and the type of CMR used. Results: Sixty-seven percent of the students ( Conclusion: CMR can be a useful tool for supporting medical students' understanding of pharmacological phenomena and solidifying students' learning toward an effective application in future clinical practice. This research highlights how more integrative, mechanism-focused curricula may be a promising area of future research in pharmacology education research. Graphical Abstract: How students employ mechanistic reasoning to connect foundational biomedical sciences (e.g., physiology, microbiology, biochemistry) with core pharmacological concepts, such as pharmacodynamics, to think through the potential adverse effects of a drug class (SGLT2 inhibitor). Causal mechanistic reasoning (CMR) can be used to understand how students use their knowledge of the underlying entities to explain a phenomenon and address pharmacology-specific questions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-025-02432-6.
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