Correlation between Assessment of Concept Maps Construction and the Clinical Reasoning Ability of Final Year Medical Students at the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University, Egypt

There is a resounding resemblance between concept maps and illness scripts described in the knowledge structure theory of clinical reasoning. Despite the growing interest in concept mapping, few studies have been done on its relationship with clinical reasoning. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between 6th year students’ (n = 55) ability to construct concept maps and their clinical reasoning skills and to improve the understanding of concept maps’ use in medical education curriculum in the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University. Analytical cross-sectional study was used and a workshop was conducted in 2017 to teach final year medical students how to construct a concept map in paediatrics discipline. Then, the developed concept maps were scored by four raters according to the Kassab and Hussain scoring system. Then a Script Concordance Test (SCT) in paediatrics was taken by these 6th year students. Correlation analysis between concept maps’ scores and SCT scores was done. The results showed a mean and SD of 14.76 ± 2.79 for the total score in concept map assessment. In clinical reasoning evaluation using SCT, 6th year students recorded a mean score of 37.2% (11.16 ± 3.55). There was a statistically significant correlation between mean scores of the total concept map assessment scores across all raters and the total scores in SCT for those 6th year students with a correlation coefficient of 0.51 (p value 0.05). The study concluded that there is a significant correlation between the 6th year medical students’ ability for constructing concept map and their clinical reasoning skills. This is considered as a starting point for the application of concept maps as an assessment tool for evaluating clinical reasoning skills in health professions education.