Michaela Wagner-Menghin - PhD project data for study 3

Learning to take patients’ histories requires life-long practice, which is often done without direct supervision in the clinic. Moreover, accurately monitoring and self-judging performance is vital for learning, also in taking patient’s histories.

Students’ self-judgement accuracy improves and gives rise to more effective learning when they base their monitoring on information (‘cues’) that is diagnostic of target performance. In this study we describe how medical students monitor their learning of history-taking. We expect to find these signs of superior monitoring amongst medical students with superior consultation skills as compared to students with poor consultation skills: (a) using cues that are closely linked to history-taking learning goals, (b) mentioning more issues related to their history-taking performance, and (c) comprising all major history-taking learning goals.