PhD defence L.M. (Ligia) Cayres Ribeiro

Summary:

Reflection has been considered an important instructional approach in medical education. Medical schools, teachers and boards have relied on reflection to support students’ learning from undergraduate to postgraduate scenarios.1,2 Although a strong theoretical framework supports the assumption that reflection fosters learning,3,4 empirical evidence of the outcomes of reflection is presently limited, as are the mechanisms that could underly the potential positive effects of reflection in the context of medical education. In this thesis, a series of experiments examined if deliberate reflection upon clinical cases could facilitate medical students’ subsequent learning of scientific texts relevant to the cases. It also examined which mechanisms, motivation and/or cognition, could underly this potential positive effect of reflection. This final Chapter presents a summary of the four experiments of this thesis, analyzes its results altogether and discusses how they can support medical teachers in their daily practice and inform future research.