My Trainee Doesn’t Make Sense: How to Diagnose and Address Clinical Reasoning Deficits in Learners Using Concept Maps

Date

2025-09-15

Overview

Clinical reasoning is a core competency required of all physicians. There are varied ways to define clinical reasoning, but it is widely thought there are a number of components, including information gathering, hypothesis generation, problem representation, differential diagnosis generation, leading diagnosis selection, diagnostic justification, and management and treatment. Deficits in clinical reasoning may be due to knowledge deficits or processing errors causing difficulties in organizing and connecting content learned, and it is critical to have methods to identify and address these deficits to develop competent physicians. One such method is utilization of concept maps: evidence-based, educational theory-driven complex organizers that use graphic representations to align and depict knowledge of a subject, and help the learner consolidate and integrate that knowledge. Concept mapping can be used as a formative assessment to identify learner gaps in medical knowledge, a clinical scenario or in a component of the clinical reasoning process. During this webinar, participants will learn ways that they can incorporate concept mapping into their educational practice as a tool to revise specific components of errors in clinical reasoning. Creation of concept maps in real time can help develop reasoning by building and integrating knowledge via review of what has been previously learned and forming new connective networks that build clinical expertise.

Speakers

• Tovah Tripp, MD
• Joshua Josephs, MD, PhD

Content Track

• Curriculum: Didactic

Audience

• UME, GME

Program Type

• Community-Based, University-Based