How Instructional Sequence and Personalized Support Impact Diagnostic Strategy Learning
This addresses the challenge of enhancing diagnostic strategy learning for pharmacy technician apprentices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing scenario-based learning methods.
The study tackled the problem of optimizing instructional sequences in scenario-based learning to improve diagnostic reasoning, finding that providing instruction after problem-solving (PS-I) leads to significantly higher performance in transfer tasks compared to before problem-solving (I-PS).
Supporting students in developing effective diagnostic reasoning is a key challenge in various educational domains. Novices often struggle with cognitive biases such as premature closure and over-reliance on heuristics. Scenario-based learning (SBL) can address these challenges by offering realistic case experiences and iterative practice, but the optimal sequencing of instruction and problem-solving activities remains unclear. This study examines how personalized support can be incorporated into different instructional sequences and whether providing explicit diagnostic strategy instruction before (I-PS) or after problem-solving (PS-I) improves learning and its transfer. We employ a between-groups design in an online SBL environment called PharmaSim, which simulates real-world client interactions for pharmacy technician apprentices. Results indicate that while both instruction types are beneficial, PS-I leads to significantly higher performance in transfer tasks.