BioWorld Today

Modeling Metacognitive Activities in Medical Problem- Solving with BioWorld

The Effect of Mood on Medical Students' Diagnostic Performance

It is clear that mood and emotion play an important role in how people deal with problems [1]. The problem-solving strategies adopted by people when they are in a happy mood are quite different than the strategies used by people when they are in a sad mood [1]. It is also well documented in the literature that individuals’ affective feelings influence their evaluative judgment, strategies of in...

Towards Investigating Performance Differences in Clinical Reasoning in a Technology Rich Learning Environment

Technology Rich Learning Environments (TREs) are increasingly used to support scholastic activities. BioWorld is an example of a TRE designed to support the metacognitive activities of learners tasked with solving virtual patient cases. The present paper aims to examine the performance differences of novice physicians in diagnosing cases in BioWorld. We present an empirically guided line of res...

Learning from Feedback In BioWorld

Technology-rich environments provide the opportunity for medical students to develop expertise in clinical reasoning through deliberate practice with appropriate feedback. This study investigates whether feedback from intermediates may result in higher learning gains for novice medical students than feedback from experts.

Using Expert Decision Maps to Promote Reflection and Self-Assessment in Medical Case-Based Instruction

We describe a pilot study that explores whether or not medical students can understand visual representations of expert thinking. This research builds upon our previous work in developing a methodology to support knowledge elicitation and knowledge validation in the ill-defined domain of medical case-based instruction [1]. Second-year medical students were assigned to one of two feedback condit...