Elena Osto, University of Zurich and University Hospital Zurich, Institute of Clinical Chemistry

Despite acquiring massive amounts of knowledge about the functioning of the human body, medical students struggle to anchor theoretical knowledge to the practice of differential diagnosis (DD). DD is defined as “the distinguishing of a particular disease or condition from others that present similar symptoms and clinical features. In the present study, we assessed acquisition and transfer of conceptual and procedural knowledge in DD with two learning and assessment methods: virtual patient simulations and conventional video lecture. Subjects of both learning groups could improve their declarative knowledge through the intervention. The virtual patient learning activity group outperformed the conventional learning group in near and far transfer of clinical reasoning skills. However, there were novel and unexpected findings in transferring conceptual knowledge to similar and very different clinical cases.