ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how learning science approaches can be used to foster teaching and learning in the medical domain. BioWorld is a technology-rich learning environment (TRE) designed to assist medical students as they learn clinical reasoning skills in the context of diagnosing virtual patient cases. A cognitive apprenticeship framework guided the design of this TRE where learning is situated in a virtual-hospital setting where students see a patient, make observations, order diagnostic tests, and make diagnoses Learning science methodologies provide a variety of approaches that help illustrate the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional processes that occur in the context of learning, resulting in different types of evidence as to when and perhaps why learning occurs or does not occur. Both instructors and researchers make decisions regarding the type of data they see as best forms of evidence based on either their instructional or research goals. Multiple methods were used to determine the types of emotions learners experienced using BioWorld.
