Previous literature has explored unconscious racial biases in clinical education and medicine, finding that people with darker skin tones can be underrepresented in learning resources and managed differently in a clinical setting. This study aimed to examine whether patient skin colour can affect the diagnostic ability and confidence of medical…

Context specificity and the impact that contextual factors have on the complex process of clinical reasoning is poorly understood. Using situated cognition as the theoretical framework, our aim was to evaluate the verbalized clinical reasoning processes of resident physicians in order to describe what impact the presence of contextual factors have…

What is involved in consolidating a new mathematical abstraction? This paper examines the work of one student who was working on a task designed to consolidate two recently constructed absolute function abstractions. The study adopts an activity theoretic model of abstraction in context. Selected protocol data are presented. The initial state of…

One purpose of this research is to develop models of cognitive processes in understanding mechanical systems. A particular focus was on the processes in mentally animating the representation of a mechanical system, and the contribution of animation graphics in comprehension. Several studies, involving eye fixations, verbal protocols, and process…

A 2-year study at the University of Sherbrooke (Quebec) investigated the changes in six medical students' clinical reasoning processes as they participated in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. In each year, students performed a think-aloud protocol with two medical case problems to solve, one in cardiology and one in urology. In the…