Virtual patients and clinical decision-making skills: How students learn to diagnose depending on their psychological characteristics (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The process of conducting a clinical assessment is a highly complex task. Virtual Patient (VP) technology may be a useful tool to complement educational activities based on real patients and it is widely used in medical education. OBJECTIVE The goal of this exploratory study is to analyse which psychological characteristics of clinical psychology students are related to the effectiveness of learning clinical decision-making skills with the use of VP. METHODS Authors’ VP was used for measuring the ability to learn the decision-making in 29 last-year clinical psychology students by: negative vs positive aspects of a patient’s functioning, reactance, coping, stage of change, cognitive errors, adequacy of assessment data, and the quality of assessment. Psychological questionnaires were used for measuring student’s: need for cognitive closure; ability to achieve closure; beliefs of changeability on human traits; the level of hope, intelligence, positive vs negative affect, and academic knowledge. RESULTS Developing clinical decision-making with the use of VP is effective for students who have a higher ability to tolerate ambiguity and complexity of data. Students convinced of the changeability of human traits take into consideration more diverse data and the process of diagnosis requires the analysis of complex phenomena. Students with dominant negative affect seem to build diagnoses more carefully and make fewer cognitive errors than those with positive affect. CONCLUSIONS Our study indicates which properties of students support and which weaken the acquisition of the ability to make a diagnosis.