supervisor: Chandan Dasgupta & hannie gijlers
when applicable: In cooperation with …
Topic
Collaborative Clinical Reasoning (CCR) is an essential skill for medical professionals, requiring effective communication, argumentation, and decision-making within team settings (Gordon et al., 2012). Many Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments have been designed to scaffold learning of CCR (Noroozi et al., 2013; Popov et al., 2014; Suthers, 2012). However, managing uncertainty during CCR, especially in culturally diverse teams, poses significant challenges. If left unattended and not managed well, uncertainty in clinical discourse can lead to ambiguous arguments and hinder consensus-building, negatively impacting diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes. Uncertainty is defined as an experience of doubt, confusion, and wondering about a situation. It may be personal/shared and subjective/intersubjective experience influenced by self and others. It could be due to lack of knowledge, inherent unknowns in the task, ambiguity of working together in a group, and risk of not reaching the goal (Jordan & McDaniel, 2014; Kaur & Dasgupta, 2024). Thus, the role of productive uncertainty management—where uncertainty fosters deeper inquiry and collaborative learning—is important in the context of CSCL supported CCR but remains underexplored (Manoli et al., 2024). This research seeks to investigate how different strategies for managing uncertainty can enhance the quality of clinical argumentation and decision-making during collaborative clinical discourse among medical students from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Objective: To examine the strategies employed by medical students to manage uncertainty during CCR and assess the impact of these strategies on the quality of argumentation and consensus-building in CSCL settings.
Potential research questions:
- How do medical students from various backgrounds handle uncertainty in collaborative clinical reasoning within CSCL environments?
- What is the relationship between uncertainty management strategies and the quality of clinical argumentation and decision-making?
Method
This will be a qualitative study involving analyzing existing CCR discourse from CSCL sessions involving multiple student groups. Transcripts of group conversations are already available. These need to be coded and analyzed to identify uncertainty management strategies and mapped to the quality of argumentation.
Expected outcomes: The research is anticipated to reveal distinct patterns in uncertainty management between students from different cultural backgrounds, contributing to a better understanding of how cultural factors influence collaborative clinical discourse. Insights will inform the development of tailored CSCL interventions to enhance uncertainty management, ultimately improving clinical reasoning education in multicultural settings.
references
Gordon, M., Darbyshire, D., & Baker, P. (2012). Medical Education, 46(11), 1042–1054. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2012.04343.x
Jordan, M. E., & McDaniel, R. R. (2014). Managing uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in elementary school teams: The role of peer influence in robotics engineering activity. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 23(4), 490–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.896254
Kaur, N., & Dasgupta, C. (2024). Investigating the interplay of epistemological and positional framing during collaborative uncertainty management. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(1), 80–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2312163
Manoli, C., Gijlers, H., Dasgupta, C., & de Leng, B. (2024). Examining Collaborative Clinical Reasoning within Synchronous Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Dutch and Finnish Medicine Students. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning-CSCL 2024, pp. 193-196. International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/10509/1/CSCL2024_193-196.pdf
Noroozi, O., Weinberger, A., Biemans, H. J. A., Mulder, M., & Chizari, M. (2013). Facilitating argumentative knowledge construction through a transactive discussion script in CSCL. Computers & Education, 61, 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.08.013
Popov, V., Noroozi, O., Barrett, J. B., Biemans, H. J. A., Teasley, S. D., Slof, B., & Mulder, M. (2014). Perceptions and experiences of, and outcomes for, university students in culturally diversified dyads in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. Computers in Human Behavior, 32, 186–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.12.008
Suthers, D. D. (2012). Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, 719–722. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_389