The clinical reasoning skills of Speech and Language Therapy students.

Difficulties experienced by novices in clinical reasoning have been well documented in many fields, especially medicine (Elstein et al., 1978; Patel and Groen, 1986; Boshuizen and Schmidt, 1992, 2000; Rikers et al., 2004). These studies have shown that novice clinicians have difficulties with both knowledge and strategy in clinical reasoning tasks. Speech and language therapy students must also learn to reason clinically, yet to date there is little evidence of how they learn to do so. In this paper, we report the clinical reasoning difficulties of a group of speech and language therapy students. We make a comparison with experienced speech and language therapists reasoning and propose some methods and materials to aid the development of clinical reasoning in speech and language therapy students.