Background: Facebook is a popular social networking site with more than five hundred million users. This study assessed whether Facebook Groups can be used to teach clinical reasoning skills. Methods: Sixty-seven final year medical students from the International Medical University, Malaysia, were exposed to interactive online learning through a Facebook Group for a period of six months in this study. The purpose was to determine if supervised interactive online learning could be used to augment the deep learning that comes from learning medicine at the bedside of patients. The interactive online discussions were entirely triggered by clinical problems encountered in the medical wards of the general hospital to which these students were attached. Results: A total of 10 topics were discussed in this forum during the duration of this study and an example of one such discussion is provided to illustrate the informal nature of this kind of learning. The results showed a high degree of student involvement with 76 percent of students actively participating in the discussions. Conclusion: The high degree of voluntary participation in the clinical discussions through the Facebook Group in this study tells us that Facebook Groups are a good way of engaging students for learning and can be used in medical education to stimulate creative clinical thinking.

Background: Clinical reasoning is the name given to the cognitive processes by which doctors evaluate and analyse information from patients. It is a skill developed by experiential learning and is difficult to assess objectively. The script concordance test, an assessment tool introduced into the health sciences about 15 years ago, is a way of assessing clinical reasoning ability in an objective manner and allows comparisons of the decisions made by medical students and experts in situations of uncertainty. Methods: Twenty-six final year medical students from the International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, were tested on their decision making skills regarding a young febrile patient. The students evaluated different pieces of information in five different scenarios and made decisions on a five-point Likert scale in the standard format of the script concordance test. Their decisions were compared to the decisions of a panel of experienced clinicians in Internal Medicine. Results: The script concordance test scores for the different scenarios were calculated with higher scores being indicative of greater concordance between the reasoning of students and doctors. The students showed poor concordance with doctors in evaluating clinical information. Overall, only 20 percent of the choices made by students were the same as the choices made by the majority of doctors. Conclusion: Medical students vary in their ability to interpret the significance of clinical information. Using the script concordance test, this preliminary study looked at the ability of final year medical students to interpret information about a patient with a febrile illness. The results showed poor concordance between students and doctors in the way they interpreted clinical information. The script concordance test has the potential to be a tool for teaching and assessing clinical reasoning.
Students, Medical ; Education, Medical