Personalized Feedback

vCases® Believes: Personalized feedback comparing one’s decisions with those of experts is a non-threatening, powerful way to learn, better than judgmental and critical commentary.

Each vCases realistic case culminates in a personalized, analytical Epilogue that reviews the recorded choices users made and compares them with the choices and rationales of the case author, an expert clinician. This Epilogue personal analysis gives users unique opportunities to confront their self-directed decisions shortly after making them, when they are most likely to be remembered. This helps them to become better diagnosticians. The Epilogue also enhances the value of vCases by helping faculty assess diagnostic performance and identify learning problems.

The Epilogue Is the Key to vCases

Here, users learn:

Why a careful history is essential to diagnosis

Why Hx Interpretations are critical

What decisions they did and did not make

When to focus more on problem areas

How their DiffDxs differ from those of the author

Why the author made different decisions

When key findings are most useful

Why DiffDx narrowing is important

How negative findings can be important.

 

Diagnosis requires 1) choices of questions to ask, areas to examine, and tests to order, and 2) interpretations of each response. Gray circles represent all possible choices before making any decision.
Colored circles represents choices or interpretations made.

Here the user made many unhelpful decisions (low efficiency) plus two supportive and one key element. Regardless of diagnosis, this indicates low efficiency and insufficient careful reasoning.

This user also made many unhelpful decisions but selected or interpreted more supportive and key choices. This shows better reasoning, selection and interpretation.

With the same options and patient, this user made 3 key and 5 supportive decisions with only one unhelpful choice. This is the work of a knowledgeable user showing high efficiency and reasoning. vCases stores selection and interpretive decisions separately.


Assess Student Learning

Look up any student or class and learn:

  • Cases completed
  • Findings discovered
  • Narrowing differentials
  • Interpretations made
  • Reasoning used
  • Every decision recorded

Assessments are based on what students DO - not recall

 

For a more complete description see here.