Designing an Educational System Using a Model of Clinical Reasoning to Support Novice Physiotherapists' Learning

The aim of this study is to support the learning of novice physical therapists. When treating a patient, the physical therapist makes clinical reasoning to grasp the patient's intrinsic problems that cause disability. The clinical reasoning is highly logical thinking that deals with complex, ambiguous and unstructured knowledge and the experience of a physical therapist contribute to handling such knowledge. Accordingly, for novice physical therapists, making clinical reasoning appropriately is a challenging problem. To support such novices, this paper proposes a model of clinical reasoning by focusing on the logical structure and provides an educational method with the model. This educational method is designed as a form of problem -based learning (PBL). In this system, a novice determines the patient's situation and therapeutic strategy based on the model, gets an exemplary model created by an experienced physical therapist as feedback. The usability test conducted for incumbents revealed that the proposed system enables novices to create a model in a simple task, leading to a deeper understanding of the cases.