Interactive virtual scenarios as a technological resource to improve musculoskeletal clinical reasoning skills of undergraduate physiotherapy students

Background Clinical reasoning is a fundamental competency in the learning process of health professionals. Since learning with traditional methods presents difficulties, teaching with interactive virtual scenarios is a good alternative. Objective To describe the impact of a blended training with interactive virtual scenarios for the development of clinical reasoning skills in undergraduate physiotherapy students. Methods A sample of 92 students solved eight storylines. Assessment error percentage, clinical pattern recognition, satisfaction, and the perception of difficulty were obtained. A proportions test was used to compare baseline and final assessments. To analyze the relationship between the variables, multilevel univariate logistic regression models were built. Results A significant difference was observed in the error percentage between baseline and final assessment (p< .001). Comparing the last storyline to the first one, there were 2.63 times more possibilities to correctly recognize the pattern. The error percentage was associated with the opportunity to recognize the pattern precisely (p< .001). Thus, for each increasing unit in the error percentage, the possibility to correctly recognize the pattern decreased by 11% (OR = 0.89). Conclusions The use of this innovative blended training with virtual scenarios allowed students to systematically improve their recognition abilities of clinical patterns and decrease mistakes in the decision-making process.